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American ^tatejsmen

EDITED BY

JOHN T. MORSE, JR.

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THOMAS HART BENTON

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THEODORE ROOSEVELT

BOSTON AND NEW YORK

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY

(Cfee JKibcrsitie l^rcss, Cambridge

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Copyright, 1886,
By THEODORE ROOSEVELT.

All rights reserved.

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The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A.
Electrotyped and Printed by H. 0. Houghton and Company.

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CONTENTS.

CHAPTER I.

PASS

The Young West 1

CHAPTER II.
Benton's Early Life and Entry into the Senate 23

CHAPTER m.
Early Years in the Senate 47

CHAPTER IV.
The Election op Jackson, and the Spoils System 69

CHAPTER V.
The Struggle with the Nullifiers . . .88

CHAPTER VI.
Jackson and Benton make War on the Bank . 114

CHAPTER VII.
The Distribution of the Surplus .... 143

CHAPTER VIII.
The Slave Question appears in Politics . .157

vi CONTENTS.

CHAPTER IX.

PAGE

The Children's Teeth are set on Edge . .184

CHAPTER X.
Last Days of the Jacksonian Democracy . . 209

CHAPTER XL
The President without a Party .... 237

CHAPTER XIL
Boundary Troubles with England .... 260

CHAPTER XIII.

The Abolitionists Dance to the Slave Barons'
Piping 290

CHAPTER XIV.
Slavery in the New Territories .... 317

CHAPTER XV.
The Losing Fight 341

THOMAS HAET BEI^TON.

CHAPTER I.
THE YOUNG WEST.

Even before the end of the Revolutionary
War the movement had begun which was to
change in form a straggling chain of sea-board
republics into a mighty continental nation, the
great bulk of whose people would live to the
westward of the Appalachian Mountains. The
hardy and restless backwoodsmen, dwelling
along the eastern slopes of the Alleghanies,
were already crossing the mountain-crests and
hewing their way into the vast, sombre forests
of the Mississippi basin ; and for the first time
English-speaking communities were growing
up along waters whose outlet was into the Gulf
of Mexico and not into the Atlantic Ocean.
Among these communities Kentucky and Ten-
nessee were the earliest to form themselves
into states ; and around them, as a nucleus,
other states of the woodland and the prairie
were rapidly developed, until, by the close of

the second decade in the present century, the
1

2 THOMAS HART BENTON.

region between the Great Lakes and the Gulf
was almost solidly filled in, and finally, in 1820,
by the admission of Missouri, the Union held
within its borders a political body whose whole
territory lay to the west of the Mississippi.

All the men who founded these states were
of much the same type ; they were rough fron-
tiersmen, of strong will and adventurous tem-
per, accustomed to the hard, barren, and yet
strangely fascinating life of those who dwell as
pioneers in the wilderness. Moreover, they
were nearly all of the same blood. The people
of New York and New England were as yet fill-
ing out their own territory ; it was not till many
years afterwards that their stock became the
predominant one in the northwestern country.
Most of the men who founded the new states
north of the Ohio came originally from the old
states south of the Potomac; Virginia and North
Carolina were the first of the original thirteen
to thrust forth their children in masses, that
they might shift for themselves in the then un-
trodden West

But though these early Western pioneers were
for the most part of Southern stock, they were
by no means of the same stamp as the men who
then and thereafter formed the ruling caste in
the old slave-holding states. They were the
mountaineers, the men of the foot-hills and

/ THE YOUNG WEST. 3

uplands, who lived in what were called the
backwfiter counties. Many of them were them-
selves of northern origin. In striking contrast
to the somewhat sluggish and peaceful elements
going to make up the rest of its heterogeneous
population, Pennsylvania also originally held
within its boundaries many members of that
most fiery and restless race, the Scotch-Irish.
These naturally drew towards the wilder, west-
ern parts of the state, settling along the slopes
of the numerous inland mountain ridges run-
ning parallel to the Atlantic coast ; and from
thence they drifted southward through the long
valleys, until they met and mingled with their
kinsfolk of Virginia and the Carolinas, when
the movement again trended towards the West.
In a generation or two, all, whether their fore-
fathers were English, Scotch, Irish, or, as was
often the case, German and Huguenot, were
welded into one people ; and in a very short
time the stern and hard surroundings of their
life had hammered this people into a peculiar
and characteristically American type, which to
this day remains almost unchanged. In their
old haunts we still see the same tall, gaunt men,
with strongly marked faces and saturnine, reso-
lute eyes ; men who may pass half their days
in listless idleness, but who are also able to show
on occasion the fiercest intensity of purpose and

4 THOMAS HART BENTON.

the most sustained energy of action. We see
them, moreover, in many places, even across to
the Pacific coast and down to the Rio Grande.
For after thronging through the gaps and passes
of the Appalachians, and penetrating the forest
region to the outskirts of the treeless country
beyond, the whilom mountaineers and woods-
men, the wielders of the axe and rifle, then
streamed off far to the West and South and
even to the Northwest, their lumbering, white-
topped wagons being, even to the present mo-
ment, a familiar sight to those who travel over
the prairies and the great plains ; while it is
their descendants who, in the saddle instead of
afoot, and with rope and revolver instead of
axe and rifle, now form the bulk of the reckless
horsemen who spend their lives in guarding the
wandering cattle herds that graze over the vast,
arid plains of the " Far West."

The method of settlement of these states of
the Mississippi valley had nothing whatever in
common with the way in which California and
the Australian colonies were suddenly filled up
by the promiscuous overflow of a civilized popu-
lation, which had practically no fear of any
resistance from the stunted and scanty native
races. It was far more closely akin to the tribe
movements of the Germanic peoples in time
past ; to that movement, for example, by which

THE YOUNG WEST, 5

the Juttish and Low Dutch sea- thieves on the
coast of Britain worked their way inland at the
cost of the Cymric Celts. The early settlers of
the territory lying immediately west of the Al-
leghanies were all of the same kind ; they were
in search of homes, not of riches, and their ac-
tions were planned accordingly, except in so far
as they were influenced by mere restless love of
adventure and excitement. Individuals and sin-
gle families, of course, often started off by them-
selves ; but for the most part the men moved in
bands, with their wives and their children, their
cattle and their few household goods ; each set-
tler being from the necessity of the case also a
fighter, ready, and often forced, to do desperate
battle in defense of himself and his family.
Where such a band or little party settled, there
would gradually grow up a village or small
town ; for instance, where those renowned pio-
neers and heroes of the backwoods, Boone and
Harrod, first formed permanent settlements af-
ter they had moved into Kentucky, now stand
the towns of Boonsboro and Harrodsburg.

The country whither these settlers went was
not one into which timid men would willingly
venture, and the founders of the West were per-
force men of stern stuff, who from the very
beginning formed a most warlike race. It is
impossible to understand aright the social and

6 THOMAS HART BENTON.

political life of the section, unless we keep
prominently before our minds that it derived
its distinguishing traits largely from the ex-
tremely militant character acquired by all the
early settlers during the long drawn out war-
fare in which the first two generations were
engaged. The land was already held by power-
ful Indian tribes and confederacies, who waged
war after war, of the most ferocious and bloody
character, against the men of the border, in
the effort to avert their inevitable doom, or at
least to stem for the time being the invasion
of the swelling tide of white settlement. At
the present time, when an Indian uprising is
a matter chiefly of annoyance, and dangerous
only to scattered, outlying settlers, it is difficult
to realize the formidable nature of the savage
Indian wars waged at the end of the last and
the beginning of the present centuries. The
red nations were then really redoubtable ene-
mies, able to send into the field thousands of
well-armed warriors, whose ferocious bravery
and skill rendered them quite as formidable
antagonists as trained European soldiers would
have been. Warfare with them did not affect
merely outlying farms or hamlets ; it meant
a complete stoppage of the white movement
westward, and great and imminent danger
even to the large communities already in ex-

THE YOUNG WEST. 7

istence ; a state of things which would have
to continue until the armies raised among the
pioneers were able, in fair shock of battle, to
shatter the strength of their red foes. The vic-
tories of Wayne and Harrison were conditions
precedent to the opening of the Ohio valley;
Kentucky was won by a hundred nameless and
bloody fights, whose heroes, like Shelby and
Sevier, afterwards rose to prominent rank in
civil life ; and it was only after. a hard-fought
campaign and slaughtering victories that the
Tennesseeans were able to break the power of
the great Creek confederacy, which was thrust
in between them and what were at that time
the French and Spanish lands lying to the
south and southwest.

The founders of our Western States were
valiant warriors as well as hardy pioneers, and
from the very first their fighting was not con-
fined to uncivilized foes. It was they who at
King's Mountain slew gallant Ferguson, and
completely destroyed his little army ; it was
from their ranks that most of Morgan's men
were recruited, when that grizzled old bush-
fighter smote Tarleton so roughly at the bat-
tle of the Cowpens. These two blows crippled
Cornwallis, and were among the chief causes of
his final overthrow. At last, during the War
of 1812, there was played out the final act in

8 THOMAS HART BENTON.

the military drama of which the West had been
the stage during the lifetime of a generation.
For this war had a twofold aspect : on the
sea-board it was regarded as a contest for the
rights of our sailors and as a revolt against
Great Britain's domineering insolence ; west of
the mountains, on the other hand, it was sim-
ply a renewal on a large scale of the Indian
struggles, all the red-skinned peoples joining
together in a great and last effort to keep the
lands which were being wrested from them ;
and there Great Britain's part was chiefly that
of ally to the savages, helping them with her
gold and with her well-drilled mercenary troops.
The battle of the Thames is memorable rather
because of the defeat and death of Tecumseh,
than because of the flight of Proctor and the
capture of his British regulars ; and for the
opening of the Southwest the ferocious fight at
the Horseshoe Bend was almost as important as
the far more famous conflict of New Orleans.

The War of 1812 brought out conspicuously
the solidarity of interest in the West. The
people there were then all pretty much of the
same blood ; and they made common cause
against outsiders in the military field exactly as
afterwards they for some time acted together
politically. Further eastward, on the Niagara
frontier, the fighting was done by the troops of

THE YOUNG WEST. 9

New York and New England, unassisted by the
Southern States ; and in turn the latter had
to shift for themselves when Washington was
burned and Baltimore menaced. It was far
otherwise in the regions lying beyond the
Appalachians. Throughout all the fighting in
the Northwest, where Ohio was the state most
menaced, the troops of Kentucky formed the
bulk of the American army, and it was the
charge of their mounted riflemen which at a
blow won the battle of the Thames. Again,
on that famous January morning, when it
seemed as if the fair Creole city was already in
Packenham's grasp, it was the wild soldiery of
Tennessee who, lolling behind their mud breast-
works, peered out through the lifting fog at
the scarlet array of the English veterans, as the
latter, fresh from their long and unbroken se-
ries of victories over the best troops of Europe,
advanced, for the first time, to meet defeat.

This solidarity of interest and feeling on the
part of the trans-Appalachian communities is a
factor often not taken into account in relating
the political history of the early part of this
century; most modern writers (who keep for-
getting that the question of slavery was thenj
not one tenth as absorbing as it afterwards be^
became) apparently deeming that the line of!
demarkation between North and South was at

10 THOMAS HART BENTON.

^ that period, as it has since in reality become,
as strongly defined west of the mountains as
east of them. That such was not the case was
due to several different causes. The first com-
ers into Tennessee and Kentucky belonged to
the class of so-called poor whites, who owned
few or no slaves, and who were far less section-

\ ally southern in their feelings than were the
rich planters of the low, alluvial plains towards
the coast of the Atlantic ; and though a slave-
owning population quickly followed the first
pioneers, yet the latter had imprinted a stamp
on the character of the two states which was
never wholly effaced,— as witness the tens of
thousands of soldiers which both, even the more
southern of the two, furnished to the Union
army in the Civil War.

If this immigration made Kentucky and Ten-
nessee, and afterwards Missouri, less distinct-
lively Southern in character than the South
Atlantic States, it at the same time, by furnish-
ing the first and for some time the most numer-
ous element in the population of the states
north of the Ohio, made the latter less charac-
teristically Northern than was the case with
' those lying east of them. Up to 1810 Indiana
kept petitioning Congress to allow slavery
within her borders ; Illinois, in the early days,
felt as hostile towards Massachusetts as did

THE YOUNG WEST. . H

Missouri. Moreover, at first the Southern
States west of the mountains greatly outweighed
the Northern, both in numbers and importance.
Thus several things came about. In the first
place, all the communities across the Allegha-
nies originally felt themselves to be closely knit
together by ties of blood, sentiment, and inter-
est ; they felt that they were, taking them
altogether. Western as opposed to Eastern. In
the next place, they were at first Southern
rather than Northern in their feeling. But, in
the third place, they were by no means so ex-
tremely Southern as were the Southern Atlantic
States. This was the way in which they looked
at themselves ; and this was the way in which
at that time others looked at them. In our
day Kentucky is regarded politically as being
simply an integral portion of the solid South ;
but the greatest of her sons, Clay, was known
to his own generation, not as a Southern states-
man, but as " Harry of the West." Of the two
presidents, Harrison and Taylor, whom the
Whigs elected, one lived . in Ohio and one in
Louisiana ; but both were chosen simply as
Western men, and, as a matter of fact, both
were born in Virginia. Andrew Jackson's vic-
tory over Adams was in some slight sense a
triumph of the South over the North, but it
was far more a triumph of the West over the

12 THOMAS HART BENTON.

East. Webster's famous sneer at old Zachary
Taylor was aimed at him as a "frontier
colonel ; " in other words, though Taylor had
a large plantation in Louisiana, Webster, and
many others besides, looked upon him as the
champion of the rough democracy of the West
rather than as the representative of the polished
slave-holders of the South.

Thus, during the first part of this century, the
term " Western " was as applicable to the states
lying south of the Ohio as to those lying north
of it. Moreover, at first the Central, or, as they
were more usually termed, the Border States,
were more populous and influential than were
those on either side of tliem, and so largely
shaped the general tone of Western feeling.
While the voters in these states, whether Whigs
or Democrats, accepted as their leaders men
like Clay in Kentucky, Benton in Missouri, and
Andrew Jackson in Tennessee, it could be
taken for granted that on the whole they felt
for the South against the North, but much
more for the West against the East, and most
strongly of all for the Union as against any
section whatsoever. Many influences came
together to start and keep alive this feeling;
but one, more potent than all the others com-
bined, was working steadily, and with ever-
increasing power, against it ; and when slavery

THE YOUNG WEST. 13

finally brought about a break between the
Northern and Southern States of the West as
complete as that in the East, then the Demo-
crats of the stamp of Jackson and Benton dis-
appeared as completely from public life as did
the Whigs of the stamp of Clay.

Benton's long political career can never be
thoroughly understood unless it is kept in mind
that he was primarily a Western and not a
Southern statesman; and it owes its especial
interest to the fact that during its continuance
the West first rose to power, acting as a unit,
and to the further fact that it was brought to a
close by the same causes which soon afterwards
broke up the West exactly as the East was al-
ready broken. Benton was not one of the few
statesmen who have left the indelible marks of
their own individuality upon our history ; but
he was, perhaps, the most typical representative
of the statesmanship of the Middle West at the
time when the latter gave the tone to the polit-
ical thought of the entire Mississippi valley.
The political school which he represented came
to its fullest development in the so-called Border
States of Kentucky, Tennessee, and Missouri,
and swayed the destinies of the West so long as
the states to the north as well as the states to
the south were content to accept the leadership
of those that lay between them, li came to an

14 THOMAS HART BENTON.

end and disappeared from sight when people
north of the Ohio at last set up their own
standard, and when, after some hesitation, the
Border States threw in their lot with the other
side and concluded to follow the Southern com-
munities, which they had hitherto led. Benton
was one of those public men who formulate and
express, rather than shape, the thought of the
people who stand behind them and whom they
represent. A man of strong intellect and keen
energy, he was for many years the foremost
representative of at least one phase of that
thought ; being, also, a man of high principle
and determined courage, when a younger gener-
ation had grown up and the bent of the thought
had changed, he declined to change with it,
bravely accepting political defeat as the alter-
native, and going down without flinching a
hair's breadth from the ground on which he
had always stood.

To understand his public actions as well as
his political ideas and principles it is, of course,
necessary to know at least a little of the men
among whom he lived and from whom he sprang:
the men who were the first of our people to
press out beyond the limits of the thirteen old
states ; who filled Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkan^
sas, and Missouri, and who for so long a time
were the dominant class all through the West,

THE YOUNG WEST. 15

until, at last, the flood of Northeastern immU
gration completely swamped their influence
north of the Ohio, while along the Gulf coast
the political control slipped from their hands
into the grasp of the great planter class.

The wood - choppers, game - hunters, and In-
dian - fighters, who first came over the moun=
tains, were only the forerunners of the more
regular settlers who followed them ; but these
last had much the same attributes as their
predecessors. For many years after the set-
tlements were firmly rooted, the life of the
settlers was still subject to all the perils of
the wilderness. Above all, the constant war-
fare in which they were engaged for nearly
thirty-five years, and which culminated in the
battle of New Orleans, left a deep and lasting
imprint on their character. Their incessant
wars were waged almost wholly by the settlers
themselves, with comparatively little help from
the federal government, and with hardly any
regular troops as allies. A backwoods levy,
whether raised to meet an Indian inroad or to
march against the disciplined armies of the
British, was merely a force of volunteers, made
up from among the full-grown male settlers,
who were induced to join either from motives of
patriotism, or from love of adventure, or because
they felt that their homes and belongings were

16 THOMAS HART BENTON.

in danger from which they could only extricat(
them by their own prowess. Every settler thuj
became more or less of a soldier, was always
expert with the rifle, and was taught to rely
upon his own skill and courage for his protec-
tion. But the military service in which he was
from time to time engaged was of such a law-
less kind, and was carried on with such utter
absence of discipline, that it did not accustom,
him in the least to habits of self-command, or
render him inclined to brook the exercise of
authority by an outsider ; so that the Western
people grew up with warlike traditions and
habits of thought, accustomed to give free rein
to tlieir passions, and to take into their own
hands the avenging of real or supposed wrongs,
but without any of the love for order and for
acting in concert with their fellows which char-
acterize those who have seen service in regular
armies. On the contrary, the chief effect of
this long- continued and harassing Border war-
fare was to make more marked the sullen and
almost defiant self-reliance of the pioneer, and
to develop his peculiarly American spirit of in-
dividual self-sufficiency, his impatience of out-
side interference or control, to a degree not
known elsewhere, even on this continent. It
also gave a distinct military cast to his way of
looking at territory which did not belong to

THE YOUNG WEST. 17

him. He stood where he was because he was a
conqueror ; he had wrested his land by force
from its rightful Indian lords ; he fully intended
to repeat the same feat as soon as he should
reach the Spanish lands lying to the west and
southwest ; he would have done so in the case
of French Louisiana if it had not been that the
latter was purchased, and was thus saved from
being taken by force of arms. This belligerent,
or, more properly speaking, piratical way of
looking at neighboring territory, was very char-
acteristic of the West, and was at the root of
the doctrine of "manifest destiny."

All the early settlers, and most of those who
came after them, were poor, living narrow lives
fraught with great hardship, and varying be-
tween toil and half-aimless roving ; even when
the conditions of their life became easier it
was some time before the influence of their
old existence ceased to make itself felt in their
way of looking at things. The first pioneers
were, it is true, soon followed by great slave-
owners ; and by degrees there grew up a clan of
large landed proprietors and stock-raisers, akin
to the planter caste which was so all-powerful
along the coast; but it was never relatively
either so large or so influential as the latter,
and was not separated from the rest of the
white population by anything like so wide a

2

18 THOMAS HART BENTON.

gap as that which, in the Southern Atlantic and
Gulf States, marked the difference between the
rich growers of cotton, rice, and sugar, and the
squalid " poor whites " or " crackers."

The people of the Border States were thus
mainly composed of small land - owners, scat-
tered throughout the country ; they tilled their
small farms for themselves, were hewers of
their own wood, and drawers of their own
water, and for generations remained accustomed
to and skillful in the use of the rifle. The pio-
neers of the ISIiddle West were not dwellers in
towns ; they kept to the open country, where
each man could shift for himself without help
or hindrance from his neighbors, scorning the
irksome restraints and the lack of individual
freedom of city life. They built but few cities
of any size ; the only two really important ones
of whose inhabitants they formed any consider-
able part, St. Louis and New Orleans, were
both founded by the French long before our
people came across the mountains into the Mis-
sissippi valley. Their life was essentially a
country life, alike for the rich and for the bulk
of the population. The few raw frontier towns
and squalid, straggling villages were neither
seats of superior culture nor yet centres for the
distribution of educated thought, as in the
North. Large tracts of land remained always

THE YOUNG WEST. 19

populated by a class of backwoodsmen differ-
ing but little from the first comers. Such was
the district from which grand, simple old Davy ,
Crockett went to Washington as a Whig con-'
gressman ; and perhaps there was never a
quainter figure in our national legislature than
that of the grim old rifleman, who shares with
Daniel Boone the honor of standing foremost
in the list of our mighty hunters. Crockett
and his kind had little in common with the
men who ruled supreme in the politics of most
of the Southern States ; and even at this day
many of their descendants in the wooded
mountain land are Republicans; for when the
Middle States had lost the control of the West,
and when those who had hitherto followed such
leaders as Jackson^ Clay, and Benton, drifted
with the tide that set so strongly to the South,
it was only the men of the type of dogged,
stubborn old Crockett who dared to make head
against it. But, indeed, one of the character-
istics of the people with whom we are dealing
was the slowness and suspicion with which they
received a new idea, and the tenacity with which
they clung to one that they had at last adopted.
They were above all a people of strong, vi^
rile character, certain to make their weight
felt either for good or for evil. They had
many virtues which can fairly be called great, \

20 THOMAS HART BENTON.

and their faults were equally strongly marked.
They were not a thrifty people, nor one given
to long-sustained, drudging work; there were
not then, nor are there now, to be found in this
land such comfortable, prosperous homes and
farms as those which dot all the country where
dwell the men of Northeastern stock. They
were not, as a rule, even ordinarily well edu-
cated ; the public school formed no such im-
portant feature in their life as it did in the life
of their fellow - citizens farther north. They
had narrow, bitter prejudices and dislikes ; the
hard and dangerous lives they had led had run
their character into a stern and almost forbid-
ding mould. They valued personal prowess
very highly, and respected no man who did not
possess the strongest capacity for self-help, and
who could not shift for himself in any danger.
They felt an intense, although perhaps ignorant,
pride in and love for their country, and looked
upon all the lands hemming in the United
States as territory which they or their children
should some day inherit ; for they were a race
of masterful spirit, and accustomed to regard
with easy tolerance any but the most flagrant
violations of law. They prized highly such
qualities as courage, loyalty, truth, and patriot-
ism, but they were, as a whole, poor, and not
over-scrupulous of the rights of others, nor jet

THE YOUNG WEST. 21

with the nicest sense of money obligations ; so
^hat the history of their state legislation affect-
ing the rights of debtor and creditor, whether
public or private, in hard times, is not pleasant
reading for an American who is proud of his
country. Their passions, once roused, were in-
tense, and if they really wished anything they
worked for it with indomitable persistency.
There was little that was soft or outwardly
attractive in their character: it was stern, rude,
and hard, like the lives they led ; but it was the
character of those who were every inch men,
and who were Americans through to the very
heart's core.

In their private lives their lawless and arro-
gant freedom and lack of self-restraint produced
much gross licentiousness and barbarous cru-
elty ; and every little frontier community could
tell its story of animal savagery as regards the
home relations of certain of its members. Yet
in spite of this they, as a whole, felt the family
ties strongly, and in the main had quite a high
standard of private morality. Many of them,
at any rate, were, according to their lights,
deeply and sincerel}^ religious ; though even
their religion showed their strong, coarse-
fibred, narrow natures. Episcopalianism was
the creed of the rich slave-owner, who dwelt
along the sea-board; but the Western settlers
belonged to some one or other of the divisions

22 THOMAS HART BENTON.

of the great Methodist and Baptist churches.
They were as savagely in earnest about this
as about everything else ; meekness, mildness,
broad liberality, and gentle tolerance of differ-
ence in religious views were not virtues they
appreciated. They were always ready to do
battle for their faith, and, indeed, had to do it,
as it was quite a common amusement for the
wilder and more lawless members of the com-
munity to try to break up by force the great
camp -meetings, which formed so conspicuous
a feature in the social and religious life of the
country. For even irreligion took the form of
active rebellion against God, rather than dis-
belief in his existence.

Physically they were, and are, especially in
Kentucky, the finest members of our race ; an
examination of the statistics relating to the
volunteers in the Civil War shows that tlie na-
tives of no other state, and the men from no
foreign country whatsoever, came up to them
in bodily development.

\ Such a people, in choosing men to represent
them in the national councils, would naturally
pay small heed to refined, graceful, and culti-
vated statesmanship ; their allegiance would be
given to men of abounding vitality, of rugged
intellect, and of indomitable will. No better
or more characteristic possessor of these attri
butes could be imagined than Thomas Benton.

CHAPTER 11.
Benton's eaely life and entry into the

SENATE.

Thomas Hart Benton was born on March
14, 1782, near Hillsborough, in Orange County,
North Carolina, — the same state that fifteen
years before, almost to a day, had seen the
birth of the great political chief whose most
prominent supporter he in after life became.
Benton, however, came of good colonial stock ;
and his early surroundings were not character-
ized by the squalid poverty that marked Jack-
son's, though the difference in the social con-
dition of the two families was of small conse-
quence on the frontier, where caste was, and
is, almost unknown, and social equality is not
a mere figure of speech — particularly it was not
so at that time in the Southwest, where there
were no servants, except black slaves, and
where even what in the North would be called
"hired help" was almost an unknown quan-
tity.

Benton's father, who was a lawyer in good
standing at the North Carolina bar, died when

24 THOMAS HART BENTON.

the boy was very young, leaving him to be
brought up by his Virginian mother. She was
a woman of force, and, for her time, of much
education. She herself began the training of
her son's mind, studying with him history and
biography, while he also, of course, had access
to his father's hiw library. The home in which
he was brought np was, for that time and for
that part of the country, straightlaced ; his
mother, though a Virginian, had many traits
which belonged rather to the descendants of
the Puritans, and possessed both their strength
of character and their austerely religious spirit.
Although living in a roistering age, among a
class peculiarly given to all the coarser kinds
of pleasure, and especially to drink and every
form of gambling, she nevertheless preserved
the most rigid decorum and morality in her
own household, frowning especially upon all
intemperance, and never permitting a pack of
cards to be found within her doors. She was
greatly beloved and respected by the son, whose
mind she did so much to mould, and she lived
to see him become one of the foremost states-
men of the country.

Young Benton was always fond of reading.
He began his studies at home, and continued
them at a grammar school taught by a young
New Englander of good ability, a very large pro-

EARLY LIFE. 25

portion of the school-teachers of the country
then coming from New England; indeed, school-
teachers and peddlers were, on the whole, the
chief contributions made by the Northeast to the
'personnel of the new Southwest. Benton thenr
began a course at Chapel Hill, the University
of North Carolina, but broke off before com-
pleting it, as his mother decided to move her
family westward to the almost unbroken wil-
derness near Nashville, Tennessee, where his
father had left them a large tract of land. But
he was such an insatiable student and reader
that he rapidly acquired a very extensive knowl-
edge, not only of law, but of history and even of
Latin and English literature, and thus became
a well-read and cultivated, indeed a learned,
man ; though his frequent displays of learning
and knowledge were sometimes marked by a
trace of that self-complacent, amusing pedantry
so apt to characterize a really well - educated
man who lives in a community in which he
believes, and with which he has thoroughly
identified himself, but whose members are for
the most part below the average in mental
cultivation.

The Bentons founded a little town, named ^
after them, and in which, of course, they took
their positiou as leaders and rich landed propri-
etors. It lay on the very outskirts of the Indian

26 THOMAS HART BENTON.

country ; indeed, the great war trail of the
Southern Indians led right through the settle-
ment, and they at all times swarmed around it.
The change from the still somewhat rude civil-
ization of North Carolina to the wildness on
the border was far less abrupt and startling
then than would be the case under similar cir-
cumstances now, and the Ben tons soon identi-
fied themselves completely with the life and in-
terests of the people around them. They even
abandoned the Episcopalianism of their old
home, and became Methodists, like their neigh-
bors. Young Benton himself had his hands
full, at first, in attending to his great backwoods
farm, tilled by slaves, and in pushing the
growth of the settlement by building first a
rude log school-house (he himself taught school
at one time, while studying law), and a meet-
ing-house of the same primitive construction,
then mills, roads, bridges, and so forth. The
work hardened and developed him, and he
readily enough turned into a regular frontiers-
man of the better and richer sort. The neigh-
boring town of Nashville was a raw, pretentious
place, where horse-racing, cock - fighting, gam-
bling, whiskey-drinking, and the various coarse
vices which masquerade as pleasures in frontier
towns, all throve in rank luxuriance. It was
somewhat of a change from Benton's early

EARLY LIFE. 27

training, but he took to it kindly, and though
never a vicious or debauched man, he bore his
full share in the savage bravrls, the shooting
and stabbing affrays, which went to make up
one of the leading features in the excessively
unattractive social life of the place and epoch.

At that time dueling prevailed more or less
throughout the United States, and in the South
and West to an extent never before or since
attained. On the frontier, not only did every
man of spirit expect now and then to be called
on to engage in a duel, but he also had to make
up his mind to take occasional part in bloody
street-fights. Tennessee, the state where Benton
then had his home, was famous for the affrays
that took place within its borders ; and that
they were common enough among the people at
large may be gathered from the fact that they
were of continual occurrence among judges,
high state officials, and in the very legislature
itself, where senators and assemblymen were
always becoming involved in undignified rows
and foolish squabbles, apparently without fear
of exciting any unfavorable comment, as witness
Davy Crockett's naive account of his early ex-
periences as a backwoods member of the Tennes-
see assembly. Like Jackson, Benton killed his
man in a duel. This was much later, m 1817,
when he was a citizen of Missouri. His oppo-

28 THOMAS HART BENTON.

nent was a lawyer named Lucas. They fought
twice, on Bloody Island, near St. Louis. On
the first occasion both were wounded ; on the
second Lucas was killed. The latter came of a
truculent family. A recent biographer of his
father, Judge John R. Lucas, remarks, with
refreshing unconsciousness of the grotesque
humor of the chronicle : "• This gentleman was
one of the most remarkable men who ever
settled west of the Mississippi River. . . .
Towards the close of his life Judge Lucas
became melancholy and dejected — the result
of domestic affliction, for six of his sons met
death by violence." One feels curious to know
how the other sons died.

But the most famous of Benton's affrays was
that with Jackson himself, in 1813. This rose
out of a duel of laughable rather than serious
character, in wliich Benton's brother was
worsted by General Carroll, afterwards one of
Jackson's lieutenants at New Orleans. The
encounter itself took place between the Benton
brothers on one side, and on the other, Jackson,
General Coffee, also of New Orleans fame, and
another friend. The place was a great rambling
Nashville inn, and the details were so intricate
that probably not even the participants them-
selves knew exactly what had taken place^
while all the witnesses impartially contradicted

\

EARLY LIFE. 29

each other and themselves. At any rate, Jack-
son was shot and Benton was pitched headlong
down-stairs, and all the other combatants were
more or less damaged ; but it ended in Jackson
being carried off by his friends, leaving the
Bentons masters of the field, where they
strutted up and down and indulged in a good
deal of loud bravado. Previous to this Benton
and Jackson had been on the best of terms, and
although there was naturally a temporary break
in their friendship, yet it proved strong enough
in the end to stand even such a violent wrench
as that given by this preposterously senseless
and almost fatal brawl. They not only became
completely reconciled, but eventually even the
closest and warmest of personal and political
friends ; for Benton was as generous and for-
giving as he was hot-tempered, and Jackson's
ruder nature was at any rate free from any
small meanness or malice.

In spite of occasional interludes of this kind,
which must have given a rather ferocious fillip
to his otherwise monotonous life, Benton com-
pleted his legal studies, was admitted to the
bar, and began to practice as a frontier lawyer
at Franklin. Very soon, however, he for the
first time entered the more congenial field of
politics, and in 1811 served a single term in
the lower house of the Tennessee legislature.

30 THOMAS HART BENTON.

Even thus early he made his mark. He had a
bill passed introducing the circuit system into
the state judiciary, a reform of much impor-
tance, especially to the poorer class of litigants;
and he also introduced, and had enacted into a
law, a bill providing that a slave should have
the same right to the full benefit of a jury trial
as would a white man suffering under the same
accusation. This last measure is noteworthy
as foreshadowing the position which Benton
afterwards took in national politics, where he
appeared as a slave-holder, it is true, but as one
of the most enlightened and least radical of his
class. Its passage also showed the tendency of
Southern opinion at the time, which was un-
doubtedly in the direction of bettering the con-
dition of the blacks, though the events of the
next few years produced such a violent revul-
sion of feeling concerning the negro race that
this current of public opinion was completely
reversed. Benton, however, was made of sturdy
stuff, and as he grew older his views on the
question did not alter as did those of most of
his colleagues.

Shortly after he left the legislature the War
of 1812 broke out, and its events impressed on
Benton another of what soon became his cardi-
nal phnciples. The war was brought on by
the South and West, the Democrats all favoring

EARLY LIFE. . 31

it, while the Federalists, forming the then anti-
Democratic party, especially in the Northeast,
opposed it; and finally their more extreme
members, at the famous Hartford Convention,
passed resolutions supposed to tend towards the
dissolution of the Union, and which brought
upon the party the bitter condemnation of their
antagonists. Says Benton himself: "At the
time of its first appearance the right of seces-
sion was repulsed and repudiated by the De-
mocracy generally. . . . The leading language
in respect to it south of the Potomac was that no
state had a right to withdraw from the Union,
. . . and that any attempt to dissolve it, or to
obstruct the action of constitutional laws, was
treason. If since that time political parties and
sectional localities have exchanged attitudes on
this question, it cannot alter the question of
right." For, having once grasped an idea and
made it his own, Benton clung to it with un-
yielding tenacity, no matter whether it was or
was not abandoned by the majority of those
with whom he had been in the habit of acting.
Thus early Benton's political character be-
came moulded into the shape which it ever
afterwards retained. He was a slave-holder,
but as advanced as a slave-holder could be ; he
remained to a certain extent a Southerner, but
his Southernism was of the type prevalent

THOMAS HART BENTON.

immediately after the Revolution, and not of
the kind that came to the fore prior to the
Rebellion. He was much more a Westerner in
his feelings, and more than all else he was
emphatically a Union man.

Like every other hot spirit of the West —
and the West was full of little but hot spirits
— Benton heartily favored the War of 1812.
He served as a colonel of volunteers under
Jackson, but never saw actual fighting, and his
short term of soldiership was of no further
account than to furnish an excuse to Polk, thir-
ty-five years later, for nominating him com-
manding general in the time of the Mexican
War, — an incident which, as the nomination
was rejected, may be regarded as merely ludi-
crous, the gross impropriety of the act safely
defying criticism. He was of genuine use,
however, in calling on and exciting the volun-
teers to come forward ; for he was a fluent
speaker, of fine presence, and his pompous self-
sufficiency was rather admired than otherwise
by the frontiersmen, while his force, energy, and
earnestness commanded their respect. He also,

r when Jackson's reckless impetuosity got him
into a snarl with the feeble national adminis-
tration, whose imbecile incapacity to carry on
the war became day by day more painfully

j[_^€vident, went to Washington, and there finally

EARLY LIFE. 33

extricated his chief by dint of threatening that,
if "justice" was not done him, Tennessee
\ would, in future political contests, be found
' ranged with the administration's foes. For
Benton already possessed political influence, and
being, like most of his class, anti-Federalist, or
Democratic, in sentiment, was therefore of the
same party as the people at Washington, and
was a man whose representations would have
some weight with them.

During his stay in Tennessee Benton's char-
acter was greatly influenced by his being
thrown into close contact with many of the
extraordinary men who then or afterwards
made their mark in the strange and picturesque
annals of the Southwest. Jackson even thus
early loomed up as the greatest and arch-typ-
ical representative of his people and his section.
The religious bent of the time was shown in
the life of the grand, rugged old Methodist,
Peter Cartwright, who, in the far-off back-
woods, was a preacher and practical exponent
of " muscular Christianity " half a century be-
fore the day when, under Bishop Selwyn and
Charles Kingsley, it became a cult among the
most highly civilized classes of England. There
was David Crockett, rifleman and congressman,
doomed to a tragic and heroic death in that
remarkable conflict of which it was said at the

3

34 THOMAS HART BENTON.

time, that " Thermopylae had its messengers of
death, but the Alamo had none : " and there
was Houston, who, after a singular and roman-
tic career, became the greatest of the states-
men and soldiers of Texas. It was these men,
and their like, who, under the shadow of world-
old forests and in the sunlight of the great,
lonely plains, wrought out the destinies of a na-
tion and a continent, and who, with their rude
war-craft and state-craft, solved problems that,
in the importance of their results, dwarf the is-
sues of all European struggles since the day of
Waterloo as completely as the Punic wars in
their outcome threw into the shade the conse-
quences of the wars waged at the same time
between the different Greek monarchies.

Benton, in his mental training, came much
nearer to the statesmen of the sea-board, and
was far better bred and better educated, than
the rest of the men around him. But he was,
and was felt by them to be, thoroughly one of
their number, and the most able expounder of
their views ; and it is just because he is so com-
pletely the type of a great and important class,
rather than because even of his undoubted and
commanding ability as a statesman, that his
life and public services will always repay study.
His vanity and boastf ulness were faults which he
shared with almost all his people ; and, after all,

EARLY LIFE. 35

if they overrated the consequence of their own
deeds, the deeds, nevertheless, did possess great
importance, and their fault was slight com-
pared to that committed by some of us at the
present day, who have gone to the opposite ex-
treme and try to belittle the actions of our
fathers. Benton was deeply imbued with the
masterful, overbearing spirit of the West, — a
spirit whose manifestations are not always agree-
able, but the possession of which is certainly a
most healthy sign of the virile strength of a
young community. He thoroughly appreciated
that he was helping to shape the future of a
country, whose wonderful development is the
most important feature in the history of the
nineteenth century; the non - appreciation of
which fact is in itself sufficient utterly to dis-
qualify any American statesman from rising to
he first rank.

It was not in Tennessee, however, that Benton
rose to political prominence, for shortly after
the close of the war he crossed the Mississippi
and made his permanent home in the territory
of Missouri. Missouri was then our extreme
western outpost, and its citizens possessed the
characteristic western traits to an even ex-
aggerated extent. \\ The people were pushing,
restless, and hardy ; they were lawless and vio-
lent to a degree. In spite of the culture and

%

36 THOMAS HART BENTON.

education of some families, society, as a whole,
was marked by florid unconventionality and
rawness. The general and widespread intem-
perance of the judges and high ofl&cials of state
was even more marked than their proclivities
for brawling, ^i The lawyers, as usual, furnislied
the bulk of the politicians ; success at the bar
depended less upon learning than upon " push "
and audacity. The fatal feuds between indi-
viduals and families were as frequent and as
bloody as among Highland clans a century be-
fore. The following quotations are taken at
random from a work on the Bench and Bar of
Missouri, by an ex-judge of its supreme court:
" A man by the name of Hiram K. Turk, and
four sons, settled in 1839 near Warsaw, and a
personal difficulty occurred between them and
a family of the name of Jones, resulting in
the death of one or two. The people began to
take sides with one or the other, and finally
a general outbreak took place, in which many
were killed, resulting in a general reign of
terror and of violence beyond the power of the
law to subdue." The social annals of this
pleasant town of Warsaw could not normally
have been dull ; in 1844, for instance, they were
enlivened by Judge Cherry and Senator Major
fighting to the death on one of its principal
streets, the latter being slain. The judges

EARLY LIFE. 37

themselves were by no means bigoted, in their
support of law and order. " In those days it
was common for people to settle their quarrels
during court week. . . . Judge Allen took
great delight in these exhibitions, and would at
any time adjourn his court to witness one. . . .
He (Allen) always traveled with a holster of
large pistols in front of his saddle, and a knife
with a blade at least a foot long." Hannibal
Chollop was no mere creature of fancy ; on the
contrary, his name was legion, and he flourished
rankly in every town throughout the Mississippi
valley. But, after all, this ruffianism was really
not a whit worse in its effects on the national
character than was the case with certain of the
" universal peace " and " non - resistance " de-
velopments in the Northeastern States; in fact,
it was more healthy. A class of professional
non-combatants is as hurtful to the real, healthy
growth of a nation as is a class of fire-eaters ;
for a weakness or folly is nationally as bad as a
vice, or worse ; and, in the long run, a Quaker
may be quite as undesirable a citizen as is a
duelist. No man who is not willing to bear
arms and to fight for his rights can give a good
reason why he should be entitled to the privi-
lege of living in a free community. The de-
cline of the militant spirit in the Northeast
during the first half of this century was much

38 THOMAS HART BENTON.

to be regretted. To it is due, more than to any
other cause, the undoubted average individual
inferiority of the Northern compared to the
Southern troops ; at any rate, at the beginning
of the great war of the Rebellion. The South-
erners, by their whole mode of living, their
habits, and their love of out-door sports, kept
up their warlike spirit ; while in the North the
so-called upper classes developed along the lines
of a wealthy and timid bourgeoisie type, meas-
uring everything by a mercantile standard (a
peculiarly debasing one if taken purely by
itself), and submitting to be ruled in local
affairs by low foreign mobs, and in national
matters by their arrogant Southern kinsmen.
The militant spirit of these last certainly stood
them in good stead in the Civil War. The
world has never seen better soldiers than those
who followed Lee ; and their leader will un-
doubtedly rank as without any exception the
very greatest of all the great captains that the
English-speaking peoples have brought forth
— and this, although the last and chief of his
antagonists may himself claim to stand as the
full equal of Marlborough and Wellington.

The other Western States still kept touch on
the old colonial communities of the sea-coast,
having a second or alternative outlet through
Louisiana, newly acquired by the LTnited States,

EARLY LIFE. 39

it is true, but which was nevertheless an old set-
tled land. Missouri, however, had lost all con-
nection with the sea-coast, and though, through
her great river towns, swarming with raftsmen
and flat-boatmen, she drove her main and most
thriving trade with the other Mississippi cities,
yet her restless and adventure-loving citizens
were already seeking other outlets for their ac-
tivity, and were establishing trade relations with
the Mexicans ; being thus the earliest among
our people to come into active contact with the
Hispano-Indian race from whom we afterwards
wrested so large a part of their inheritance.
Missouri was thrust out beyond the Mississippi
into the vast plains-country of the Far West,
and except on the river-front was completely
isolated, being flanked on every side by great
stretches of level wilderness, inhabited by roam-
ing tribes of warlike Indians. Thus for the
first time the borderers began to number in
their ranks plainsmen as well as backwoods-
men. In such a community there were sure to
be numbers of men anxious to take part in any
enterprise that united the chance of great pe-
cuniary gain with the certainty of even greater
personal risk, and both these conditions were
fulfilled in the trading expeditions pushed out
from Missouri across the trackless wastes lying
between it and the fringe of Mexican settle-

40 THOMAS HART BENTON.

ments on the Rio del Norte. The route fol-
lowed by these caravans, which brought back
furs and precious metals, soon became famous
under the name of the Santa F^ trail ; and
the story of the perils, hardships, and gains of
the adventurous traders who followed it would
make one of the most striking chapters of
American history.

Among such people Benton's views and habits
of thought became more markedly Western and
ultra-American than ever, especially in regard
to our encroachments upon the territory of
neighboring powers. The general feeling in
the West upon this last subject afterwards
crystallized into what became known as the
*' Manifest Destiny " idea, which, reduced to its
simplest terms, was : that it was our manifest
destiny to swallow up the land of all adjoining
nations who were too weak to withstand us ; a
theory that forthwith obtained immense pop-
ularity among all statesmen of easy interna-
tional morality. \\ It cannot be too often re-
peated that no one can understand even the
domestic, and more especially the foreign, pol-
icy of Benton and his school without first un-
derstanding the surroundings amidst which they
had been brought up and the people whose
chosen representatives they were. Recent his-
torians, for instance, always speak as if our

EARLY LIFE. 41

grasping after territory in the Southwest was
due solely to the desire of the Southerners to
acquire lands out of which to carve new slave-
holding states, and as if it was merely a move
in the interests of the slave-power. This is
true enough so far as the motives of Calhoun,
Tyler, and the other public leaders of the Gulf
and southern sea-board states were concerned.
But the hearty Western support given to the
movement was due to entirely different causes,
the chief among them being the fact that the
Westerners honestly believed themselves to be
indeed created the heirs of the earth, or at least
of so much of it as was known by the name of
North America, and were prepared to struggle
stoutly for the immediate possession of their
heritage.

One of Benton's earliest public utterances
was in regard to a matter which precisely
illustrates this feeling.'/ It was while Missouri
was still a territory, and when Benton, then a
prominent member of the St. Louis bar, had
by his force, capacity, and power as a public
speaker already become well known among his
future constituents. The treaty with Spain, by
which we secured Florida, was then before the
Senate, which body had to consider it several
times, owing to the dull irresolution and sloth
of the Spanish government in ratifying it. The

42 THOMAS HART BENTON.

bounds it gave us were far too narrow to suit
the more fiery Western spirits, and these cheered
Benton to the echo when he attacked it in pub-
lic with fierce vehemence. " The magnificent
valley of the Mississippi is ours, with all its
fountains, springs, and floods ; and woe to the
statesman who shall undertake to surrender one
drop of its water, one inch of its soil to any for-
eign power." So he said, his words ringing
with the boastful confidence so well liked by
the masterful men of the West, strong in their
youth, and proudly conscious of their strength.
The treaty was ratified in the Senate, neverthe-
less, all the old Southern States favoring it,
and the only votes at any stage recorded against
it being of four Western senators, coming re-
spectively from Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee,
and Louisiana. So that in 1818, at any rate, the
desire for territorial aggrandizement at the ex-
pense of Spain or Mexico was common to the
West as a whole, both to the free and the slave
states, and was not exclusively favored by the
Southerners. The only effect of Benton's speech
was to give rise to the idea that he was hostile
to the Southern and Democratic administration
at Washington, and against this feeling he had
to contend in the course of his successful can-
didacy for the United States senatorship the
following year, when Missouri was claiming ad-
mittance to the Union.

* EARLY LIFE. 43

It was in reference to this matter of aam it-
ting Missouri that the slavery question for the
first time made its appearance in national^
politics, where it threw everything into confu-
sion and for the moment overshadowed all else ;
though it vanished almost as quickly as it had
appeared, and did not again come to the front
for several years. The Northerners, as a whole,
desiring to " restrict " the growth of slav-
ery and the slave-power, demanded that Mis-
souri, before being admitted as a state, should
abolish slavery within her boundaries. The
South was equally determined that she should
be admitted as a slave state ; and for the first
time the politicians of the country divided on
geographical rather than on party lines, though
the division proved but temporary, and was of
but little interest except as foreshadowing what
was to come a score of years later. Even within
the territory itself the same contest was carried
on with the violence bred by political conflicts
in frontier states, there being a very respecta-
ble " restriction " party, which favored aboli-
tion. Benton was himself a slave-holder, and
as the question was in no way one between the
East and the West, or between the Union as a
whole and any part of it, he naturally gave full
swing to his Southern feelings, and entered with
tremendous vigor into the contest on the anti-

44 THOMAS HART BENTON. *

restriction side. So successful were his efforts,
and so great was the majority of the Mis-
soiirians who sympathized with him, that the
restrictionists were completely routed and suc-
ceeded in electing but one delegate to the con-
stitutional convention. In Congress the matter
was finally settled by the passage of the famous
Missouri Compromise bill, a measure Southern
in its origin, but approved at the time by many
if not most Northerners, and disapproved by
not a few Southerners. Benton heartily believed
in it, announcing somewhat vaguely that he
was " equally opposed to slavery agitation and
to slavery extension." By its terms Missouri
was admitted as a slave state, while slaveiy was
abolished in all the rest of the old province of
Louisiana lying north and west of it and north of
the parallel of 3G° 30'. Owing to an objection-
able clause in its Constitution, the admission
was not fully completed until 1821, and then
only through the instrumentality of Henry
Clay. But Benton took his seat immediately,
and entered on his thirty years' of service in
the United States Senate. His appearance in
national politics was thus coincident with the
appearance of the question which, it is true,
almost immediately sank out of sight for a
period of fifteen years, but which then reap-
peared to stay for good and to become of pro-

EARLY LIFE. 45

gressively absorbing importance, until, combin-
ing itself with the still greater question of na-
tional unity, it dwarfed all other issues, cleft
the West as well as the East asunder, and, as
one of its minor results, brought about the
political downfall of Benton himself and of his
whole school in what were called the Border
States.

Before entering the Senate, Benton did some-
thing which well illustrates his peculiar upright-
ness, and the care which he took to keep his pub-
lic acts free from the least suspicion of improper
influence. When he was at the bar in St. Louis,
real estate litigation was much the most impor-
tant branch of legal business. The condition of
Missouri land-titles was very mixed, since many
of them were based upon the thousands of " con-
cessions " of land made by the old French and
Spanish governments, which had been ratified
by Congress, but subject to certain conditions
which the Creole inhabitants, being ignorant
and lawless, had generally failed to fulfill. By
an act of Congress these inchoate claims were to
be brought before the United States recorder of
land titles ; and the Missouri bar were divided
as to what action should be taken on them, the
majority insisting that they should be held void,
while Benton headed the opposite party, which
was averse to forfeiting property on technical

46 THOMAS HART BENTON.

grounds, and advocated the confirmation of
every honest claim. Further and important
legislation was needed to provide for these
claims. Benton, being much the most influen-
tial member of the bar who had advocated the
confirmation of the claims, and being so able,
honest, and energetic, was the favorite counsel
of the claimants, and had hundreds of their
titles under his professional charge. Of course
in such cases the compensation of the lawyer
depended solely upon his success ; and success
to Benton would have meant wealth. Never-
theless, and though his action was greatly to
his own pecuniary hurt, the first thing he did
when elected senator was to convene his clients,
and tell them tlutt henceforth he could have
nothing more to do, as their attorney, with the
prosecution of their claims, giving as his reason
that their success largely depended upon the ac-
tion of Congress, of which he was now himself
a member, so that he was bound to consult, not
any private interest, but the good of the com-
munity as a whole. He even refused to desig-
nate his successor in the causes, saying that he
was determined not only to be quite unbiased
in acting upon the subject of these claims as
senator, but not to have, nor to be suspected
of having, any personal interest in the fate of
any of them. Many a modern statesman might
most profitably copy his sensitiveness.

CHAPTER III.
EARLY YEARS IN THE SENATE.

When Benton took his seat in the United
States Senate, Monroe, the last president of
the great house of Virginia, was about beginning
his second term. He was a courteous, high-bred '
gentleman, of no especial ability, but well fitted
to act as presidential figure-head during the
politically quiet years of that era of good feel- >
ing which lasted from 1816 till 1824. ' The ^
Federalist party, after its conduct during the
war, had vanished into well-deserved obscurity,
and though influences of various sorts were
working most powerfully to split the dominant
and all-embracing Democracy into factional
fragments, these movements had not yet come
to a head.

The slavery question, it cannot be too often
said, was as j^et of little or no political conse-
quence. The violent excitement over the ad-
mission of Missouri had subsided as quickly
as it had arisen ; and though the Compromise
bill was of immense importance in itself, and

48 THOMAS HART BENTON.

still more as giving a hint of what was to come,
it must be remembered that its effect upon
general politics, during the years immediately
succeeding its passage, was slight. Later on, the
slavery question became of such paramount con-
sequence, and so completely identified with the
movement for the dissolution of the Union, that
it seems impossible for even the best of recent
historians of American politics to understand
that such was not the case at this time. One
writer of note even goes so far as to state that
" From the night of March 2, 1820, party his-
tory is made up without interruption or break
of the development of geographical [the context
shows this to mean Northern and Southern]
parties." There is very little ground for such
a sweeping assertion until a considerable time
after the date indicated ; indeed, it was more
than ten years later before any symptom of the
development spoken of became at all marked.
Until then, parties divided even less on geo-
graphical lines than had been the case earlier,
during the last years of the existence of the
Federalists ; and what little division there was
had no reference to slavery. Nor was it till
nearly a score of years after the passage of the
Missouri Compromise bill that the separatist
spirit began to identify itself for good with the
idea of the maintenance of slavery. Previously

EARLY YEARS IN THE SENATE. 49

to that there had been outbursts of separatist
feeling in different states, but always due to en-
tirely different causes. Georgia flared up in hot
defiance of the federal government, when the
latter rubbed against her on the question of re°
moving the Cherokees from within her borderso
But her having negro slaves did not affect her
feelings in the least, and her attitude was just
such as any Western state with Indians on its
frontier is now apt to assume so far as it dares,
— such an attitude as Arizona, for example,
would at this moment take in reference to the
Apaches, if she were able. Slavery was doubt-
less remotely one of the irritating causes that
combined to work South Carolina up to a fever
heat of insanity over the nullification excite-
ment. But in its immediate origin nullification
arose from the outcry against the protective
tariff, and it is almost as unfair to ascribe it
in any way to the influence of slavery as it
would be to assign a similar cause for the Vir-
ginia and Kentucky resolutions of 1798, or to
say that the absence of slavery was the reason
for the abortively disloyal agitation in New
England, which culminated in the Hartford Con-
vention. The separatist feeling is ingrained in
the fibre of our race, and though in itself a
most dangerous failing and weakness, is yet
merely a perversion and distortion of the defiant

50 THOMAS HART BENTON.

and self-reliant independence of spirit which is
one of the chief of the race virtues ; and slavery
was partly the cause and partly merely the
occasion of the abnormal growth of the separa-
tist movement in the South. Nor was the tariff
question so intimately associated with that of
slavery as has been commonly asserted. This
might be easily guessed from the fact that the
originator and chief advocate of a high tariff
himself came from a slave state, and drew many
of his warmest supporters from among the slave-
holding sugar-planters. Except in the futile
discussion over the proposed Panama Congress it
was not till Benton's third senatorial term that
slavery became of really great weight in politics.
One of the first subjects that attracted Ben-
ton's attention in the Senate was the Oregon
question, and on this he showed himself at once
in his true character as a Western man, proud
alike of every part of his country, and as desir-
ous of seeing the West extended in a northerly
as in a southerly direction. Himself a slave-
holder, from a slave state, he was one of the
earliest and most vehement advocated of the ex-
tension of our free territory northwards along
the Pacific coast. All the country stretching
north and south of the Oregon River was then
held by the United States in joint possession
with Great Britain. But the whole region was

EARLY YEARS IN THE SENATE. 51

still entirely unsettled, and as a matter of fact
our British rivals were the only parties in actual
occupation. The title to the territory was
doubtful, as must always be the case when it
rests upon the inaccurate maps of forgotten ex-
plorers, or upon the chance landings of stray
sailors and traders, especially if the land in
dispute is unoccupied and of vast but uncer-
tain extent, of little present value, and far dis-
tant from the powers claiming it. The real
truth is that such titles are of very little prac-
tical value, and are rightly enough disregarded
by any nations strong enough to do so. Ben-
ton's intense Americanism, and his pride and
confidence in his country and in her unlimited
capacity for growth of every sort, gifted him
with the power to look much farther into the
future, as regarded the expansion of the United
States, than did his colleagues ; and moreover
caused him to consider the question from a
much more far-seeing and statesmanlike stand-
point. The land belonged to no man, and yet
was sure to become very valuable ; our title to it
was not very good, but was probably better than
that of any one else. Sooner or later it would
be filled with the overflow of our population,
and would border on our dominion, and on
our dominion alone. It was therefore just, and
moreover in the highest degree desirable, that

52 THOMAS HART BENTON.

it should be made a part of that dominion at
the earhest possible moment. Benton intro-
duced a bill to enable the president to terminate
tbe arrangement with Great Britain and make
a definite settlement in our favor ; and though
the Senate refused to pass it, yet he had the
satisfaction of bringing the subject prominently
before the people, and, moreover, of outlining
the way in which it would have to be and wa^
finally settled. In one of his speeches on the
matter he said, using rather highflown language,
(for he was unfortunately deficient in sense of
humor) : '' Upon the people of Eastern Asia the
establishment of a civilized power on the oppo-
site coast of America could not fail to produce
great and wonderful benefits. Science, liberal
principles in government, and the true religion
might cast tbeir liglits across the intervening
sea. The valley of the Columbia might become
the granary of China and Japan, and an outlet
to their imprisoned and exuberant population."
Could he have foreseen liow, in the future, the
Americans of the valley of the Columbia would
greet tlie " imprisoned and exuberant popula-
tion " of China, he would probably have been
more doubtful as to the willingness of the latter
empire to accept our standard of the true relig-
ion and liberal principles of government. In
the course of the same speech he for the first

EARLY YEARS IN THE SENATE. 53

time, and by what was then considered a bold
flight of imagination, suggested the possibility
of sending foreign ministers to the Oriental
nations, to China, Japan, and Persia, " and even
to the Grand Turk."

Better success attended a bill he introduced
to establish a trading-road from Missouri through
the Indian country to New Mexico, which, after
much debate, passed both houses and was signed
by President Monroe. The road thus marked
put and established became, and remained for
many years, a great thoroughfare, and among
the chief of the channels through which our for-
eign commerce flowed. Until Benton secured
the enactment of this law, so important to the
interests and development of the West, the
overland trade with Mexico had been carried
on by individual effort and at the cost of incal-
culable hazard, hardship, and risk of life. Mex-
ico, with its gold and silver mines, its strange
physical features, its population utterly foreign
to us in race, religion, speech, and ways of life,
and especially because of the glamour of mys-
tery which surrounded it and partly shrouded
it from sight, always dazzled and strongly at-
tracted the minds of the Southwesterners, occu-
pying much the same place in their thoughts
that the Spanish Main did in the imagination of
England during the reign of Elizabeth. The

54 THOMAS HART BENTON.

»

young men of the Mississippi valley looked upon
an expedition with one of the bands of armed
traders, who wound their way across Indian-
haunted wastes, through deep canyons and over
lofty mountain passes, to Santa F^, Chihuahua,
and Sonora, with the same feelings of eager ex-
citement and longing that were doubtless felt by
some of their forefathers more than two centu-
ries previously in regard to the cruises of Drake
and Hawkins. The long wagon trains or pack
trains of the traders carried with them all kinds
of goods, but especially cotton, and brought back
gold and silver bullion, bales of furs and droves
of mules ; and, moreover, they brought back tales
of lawless adventure, of great gains and losses,
of fights against Indians and Mexicans, and of
triumphs and privations, which still further in-
flamed the minds of the Western men. Where
they had already gone as traders, who could on
occasion figlit, they all hoped on some futui-e
day to go as warriors, who would acquire gain
by their conquests. These hopes were openly
expressed, and with very little more idea of
there being any right or wrong in the matter
than so many Norse Vikings miglit have felt.
The Southwesterners are credited with alto-
gether too complex motives when it is supposed
that they were actuated in regard to the conquest
of northern Mexico by a desire to provide for

EARLY YEARS IN THE SENATE. 65

additional slave states to offset the growth of
the North; their emotions in regard to their
neighbor's land were in the main perfectly sim-
ple and purely piratical. That the Northeast
did not share in the greed for new territory
felt by the other sections of the country was
due partly to the decline in its militant spirit,
(a decline on many accounts sincerely to be
regretted,) and partly to its geographical situ-
ation, since it adjoined Canada, an unattrac-
tive and already well- settled country, jealously
guarded by the might of Great Britain.
/ Another question, on which Benton showed
/himself to be thoroughly a representative of
/ Western sentiment, was the removal of the
/ Indian tribes. Here he took a most active and
/ prominent part in reporting and favoring the
i bills, and in advocating the treaties, by which
the Indian tribes of the South and West were
forced or induced, (for the latter word was very
frequently used as a euphemistic synonym of
the former,) to abandon great tracts of territory
to the whites and to move farther away from
the boundaries of their ever-encroaching civili-
zation. Nor was his action wholly limited to
the Senate, for it was at his instance that
General Clark, at St. Louis, concluded the
treaties with the Kansas and Osage tribes, by
which the latter surrendered to the United

56 THOMAS HART BENTON.

Sta,tes all the vast territory which they nom-
inally owned west of Missouri and Arkansas,
except small reserves for themselves. Benton,
as was to be expected, took the frontier view
of the Indian question, which, by the way,
though often wrong, is much more apt to be
right than is the so-called humanitarian or
Eastern view. But, so far as was compatible
with having the Indians removed, he always
endeavored to have them kindly and humanely
treated. There was, of course, much injustice
and wrong inevitably attendant upon the In-
dian policy advocated by him, and by the rest
of the Southern and Western statesmen ; but
it is difficult to see what other course could
have been pursued with most of the tribes. In
the Western States there were then sixty mil-
lions of acres of the best land, owned in great
tracts by barbarous or half-barbarous Indians,
who were always troublesome and often dan-
gerous neighbors, and who did not come in any
way under the laws of the states in which they
lived. The states thus encumbered would evi-
dently never have been satisfied until all their
soil was under their own jurisdiction and open
to settlement. The Cherokees had advanced
far on the road toward civilization, and it was
undoubtedly a cruel grief and wrong to take
them away from their homes ; but the only al-

EARLY YEARS IN THE SENATE. 57

ternative would have been to deprive them of
much of their land, and to provide for their
gradually becoming citizens of the states in
which they were. For a movement of this sort
the times were not then, and, unfortunately,
are not yet ripe.

Much maudlin nonsense has been written
about the governmental treatment of the In=
dians, especially as regards taking their land.
For the simple truth is that they had no possi-
ble title to most of the lands we took, not even
that of occupancy, and at the most were in
possession merely by virtue of having butch-
ered the previous inhabitants. For many of
its actions towards them the government does
indeed deserve the severest criticism ; but it
has erred quite as often on the side of too much
leniency as on the side of too much severity.
From the very nature of things, it was wholly
impossible that there should not be much mu-
tual wrong-doing and injury in the intercourse
between the Indians and ourselves. It was
equally out of the question to let them remain
as they were, and to bring the bulk of their
number up to our standard of civilization with
sufficient speed to enable them to accommodate
themselves to the changed condition of their
surroundings. The policy towards them advo-
cated by Benton, which was much the same as,

58 THOMAS HART BENTON.

although more humane than, that followed by
most other Western men who have had practi-
cally to face the problem, worked harshly in
many instances, and was the cause of a certain
amount of temporary suffering. But it was
infinitely better for the nation, as a whole, and,
in the end, was really more just and merciful,
than it would have been to attempt following
out any of the visionary schemes which the
more impracticable Indian enthusiasts are fond
of recommending.

It was during Monroe's last term that Henry
Clay brought in the first protective tariff bill,
as distinguished from tariff bills to raise reve-
nue with protection as an incident only. It was
passed by a curiously mixed vote, which hardly
indicated any one's future position on the tariff
excepting that of Clay himself ; Massachusetts,
under the lead of Webster, joining hands with
the Southern sea-coast states to oppose it, while
Tennessee and New York split, and Missouri
and Kentucky, together with most of the North,
favored it. Benton voted for it, but on the
great question of internal improvements he
stood out clearly for the views that he ever
afterwards held. This was first brought up by
the veto, on constitutional grounds, of the
Cumberland Road bill, which had previously
passed both houses with singular unanimity,

EARLY YEARS IN THE SENATE. 69

Benton's vote being one of the very few re-
corded against it. In regard to all such matters
Benton was strongly in favor of a strict con-
struction of the Constitution and of guarding
the rights of the states, in spite of his devoted
attachment to the Union. While voting against
this bill, and denying the power or the right of
the federal government to take charge of im-
provements which would benefit one state only,
Benton was nevertheless careful to reserve to
himself the right to support measures for im-
proving national rivers or harbors yielding rev-
enues. The trouble is, that however much the
two classes of cases may differ in point of ex-
pediency, they overlap so completely that it
is wholly impossible to draw a hard and fast
line between them, and the question of consti-
tutionality, if waived in the one instance, can
scarcely with propriety be raised in the other.
With the close of Monroe's second term the
" era of good feeling " came to an end, and the
great Democratic-Republican party split up into
several fragments, which gradually crystallized
round two centres. But in 1824 this process
was still incomplete, and the presidential elec-
tion of that year was a simple scramble be-
tween four different candidates, — Jackson,
Adams, Clay, and Crawford. Jackson had the
greatest number of votes, but as no one had

60 THOMAS HART BENTON.

a niajorit}^ the election was thrown into the
House of Representatives, where the Clay men,
inasmuch as their candidate was out of the race,
went over to Adams and elected him. Benton
at the time, and afterwards in his " Thirty
Years' View," inveiglied iigainst this choice as
being a violation of what he called the *' prin-
ciple demos krateo" — a barbarous phrase for
which he had a great fondness, and wliich he
used and misused on every possible occasion,
whether in speaking or writing. He insisted
ftCutJf ■t'>lf^^\ that, as Jackson had secured the majority of
the electoral vote, it was the duty of the House
of Representatives to ratify promptly this
*' choice of the people." The Constitution ex-
pressly provided that this need not be done.
So Benton, who on questions of state rights
and internal improvements was so pronounced
a stickler for a strict construction of the Con-
stitution, here coolly assumed the absurd posi-
tion that the Constitution was wrong on this
particular point, and should be disregarded, on
the ground that there was a struggle " between
the theory of the Constitution and the demo-
cratic principle." His proposition was ridicu-
lous. The " democratic principle " had nothing
more to do with the matter than had the law
of gravitation. Either the Constitution was or'
it was not to be accepted as a serious document,

EARLY YEARS IN THE SENATE. 61

that meant something ; in the former case the
election of Adams was proper in every aspect,
in the latter it was unnecessary to have held
any election at all. i

At this period every one was floundering
about in efforts to establish political relations^
Benton not less than others ; for he had begun
the canvass as a supporter of Clay, and had
then gone over to Crawford. But at the end
he had become a Jacksonian Democrat, and
during the rest of his political career he figured
as the most prominent representative of the
Jacksonian Democracy in the Senate. Van
Baren himself, afterwards Jackson's prime fa-
vorite and political heir, was a Crawford man
during this campaign.

Adams, after his election, which was owing
to Clay's support, gave Clay the position of
secretary of state in his cabinet. The affair
unquestionably had an unfortunate look, and
the Jacksonians, especially Jackson, at once
raised a great hue and cry that there had been
a corrupt bargain. Benton, much to his credit,
refused to join in the outcry, stating that he
had good and sufficient reasons — which he gave
— to be sure of its falsity; a position which
brought him into temporary disfavor with many
of his party associates, and which a man who
had Benton's ambition and bitter partisanship,

62 THOMAS HART BENTON.

without having his sturdy pluck, would have
hesitated to take. The assault was directed
with especial bitterness against Clay, whom
Jackson ever afterwards included in the very
large list of individuals whom he hated with
the most rancorous and unreasoning virulence.
Randolph of Roanoke, the privileged eccentric
of the Senate, in one of those long harangues
in which he touched upon everybody and every-
thing, except possibly the point at issue, made
a rabid onslaught upon the Clay-Adams coali-
tion as an alliance of ''the blackleg and the
Puritan." Clay, who was susceptible enough
to the charge of loose living, but who was a
man of rigid honor and rather fond than other-
wise of fighting, promptly challenged him, and
a harmless interchange of shots took place.
Benton was on the field as the friend of both
parties, and his account of the affair is very
amusing in its description of the solemn, hair-
splitting punctilio with which it is evident that
both Randolph and many of his contemporaries
regarded points of dueling honor, which to us
seem either absurd, trivial, or wholly incompre-
hensible..

Two tolerably well-defined parties now
emerged from the chaos of contending politi-
cians : one was the party of the administration,
whose members called themselves National Re-

EARLY YEARS IN THE SENATE. 63

publicans, and later on Whigs ; the other was
the Jacksonian Democracy. Adams's inaugural
address and first message outlined the Whig
policy as favoring a protective tariff, internal
improvements, and a free construction of the
Constitution generally. The Jacksonians ac-
cordingly took the opposite side on all these
points, partly from principle and partly from
perversity. In the Senate they assailed with
turgid eloquence every administration measure,
whether it was good or bad, very much of their
opposition being purely factious in character.
There has never been a time when there was
more rabid, objectless, and unscrupulous dis-
play of partisanship. Benton, little to his
credit, was a leader in these purposeless con-
flicts. The most furious of them took place
over the proposed Panama mission. This was
a scheme that originated in the fertile brain of
Henry Clay, whose Americanism was of a type
quite as pronounced as Benton's, and who was
always inclined to drag us into a position of
hostility to European powers. The Spanish-
American States, having succeeded in winning
their independence from Spain, were desirous of
establishing some principle of concert in action
among the American republics as a whole, and
for this purpose proposed to hold an inter-
national congress at Panama. Clay's fondness

64 THOMAS HART BENTON.

for a spirited and spectacular foreign policy
made liim grasp eagerly at the chance of trans-
forming the United States into the head of an
American league of free republics, which would
be a kind of cis-Atlantic offset to the Holy Al-
liance of European despotisms. Adams took
up the idea, nominated ministers to the Panama
Congress, and gave his reasons for his course in
a special message to the Senate. The adminis-
tration men drew the most rosy and impossible
pictures of the incalculable benefits which would
be derived from the proposed congress ; and the
Jacksonians attacked it with an exaggerated
denunciation that was even less justified by the
facts.

Adams's message was properly open to at-
tack on one or two points ; notably in reference
to its proposals that we should endeavor to get
the Spanish- American States to introduce re-
ligious tolerance within their borders. It was
certainly an unhappy suggestion that we should
endeavor to remove the mote of religious in-
tolerance from our brother's eye while indig-
nantly resenting the least allusion to the beam
of slavery in our own. It was on this very
point of slavery that the real opposition hinged.
The Spanish States had emancipated their com-
paratively small negro populations, and, as is
usually the case with Latin nations, did not

EARLY YEARS IN THE SENATE. 65

have a very strong caste feeling against the
blacks, some of whom accordingly had risen to
liigli civic and military rank ; and they also
proposed to admit to their congress the negro
republic of Hayti. Certain of the slave-holders
of the South fiercely objected to any such assO'
ciation ; and on this occasion Benton for once
led and voiced the ultra-Southern feeling on the
subject, announcing in his speech that diplo-
matic intercourse with Hayti should not even
be discussed in the senate chamber, and that
we could have no association with republics
who had ''black generals in their armies and
mulatto senators in their congresses." But this
feeling on the part of the slave-holders against
the measure was largely, although not wholly,
spurious ; and really had less to do with the at-
titude of the Jacksonian Democrats than had
a mere factious opposition to Adams and Clay,
This was shown by the vote on the confirmation
of the ministers, when the senators divided on
party and not on sectional lines. The nomina-
tions were confirmed, but not till after such a
length of time that the ministers were unable to
reach Panama until after the congress had ad-
journed.

The Oregon question again came up during
Adams's term, the administration favoring the
renewal of the joint occupation convention, by

QQ THOMAS HART DENTON.

which we held the country in common with
Great Britain. There was not much public
feeling in the matter ; in the East there was
none whatever. But Benton, when he opposed
the renewal, and claimed the whole territory as
ours, gave expression to the desires of all the
Westerners who thought over the subject at
all. He was followed by only half a dozen
senators, all but one from the West, and from
both sides of the Ohio — Illinois, Kentucky,
Tennessee, Mississippi ; the Northwest and
Southwest as usual acting together.

The vote on the protective tariff law of 1828
furnished another illustration of the solidarity
of the West. New England had abandoned
her free trade position since 1824, and the
North went strongly for the new tariff ; the
Southern sea-coast states, except Louisiana, op-
posed it bitterly ; and the bill was carried by the
support of the Western States, both the free
and the slave. This tariff bill was the first of
the immediate irritating causes which induced
South Carolina to go into the nullification move-
ment. Benton's attitude on the measure was
that of a good many other men who, in their
public capacities, are obliged to appear as pro-
tectionists, but who lack his frankness in stat-
ing their reasons. He utterly disbelieved in
and was opposed to the principle of the bill, but

EARLY YEARS IN THE SENATE. 67

as it had bid for and secured the interest of
Missouri by a heavy duty on lead, he felt him-
self forced to support it ; and so he announced
his position. He simply went with his state,
precisely as did Webster, the latter, in follow-
ing Massachusetts' change of front and sup-
porting the tariff of 1828, turning a full and
complete somersault. Neither the one nor the
other was to blame. Free traders are apt to
look at the tariff from a sentimental stand-point ;
but it is in reality purely a business matter,
and should be decided solely on grounds of ex-
pediency. Political economists have pretty
generally agreed that protection is vicious in
theory and harmful in practice ; but if the
majority of the people in interest wish it, and \
it affects only themselves, there is no earthly
reason why they should not be allowed to try
the experiment to their hearts' content. The
trouble is that it rarely does affect only them-
selves; and in 1828 the evil was peculiarly
aggravated on account of the unequal way in
which the proposed law would affect different
sections. It purported to benefit the rest of
the country, but it undoubtedly worked real
injury to the planter states, and there is small
ground for wonder that the irritation over it in
the region so affected should have been intense.
During Adams's term Benton began his fight

CS THOMAS BART BENTON.

for_disposing of tlie public lands to actual
settlers at a small cost. It was a move of
enormous importance to the whole West ; and
Benton's long and sturdy contest for it, and for
the right of preemption, entitle him to the
greatest credit. He never gave up the struggle,
although repulsed again and again, and at the
best only partially successful ; for he had to en-
counter much opposition, especially from the
short-sighted selfishness of many of the North-
easterners, who wished to consider the public
lands purely as sources of revenue. He utterly
opposed the then existing system of selling land
to the highest bidder — a most hurtful practice ;
and objected to the establishment of an arbi-
trary minimum price, which practically kept all
land below a certain value out of the market
altogether. He succeeded in establishing the
preemption system, and had the system of rent-
ing public mines, etc., abolished ; and he strug-
gled for the principle of giving land outright to
settlers in certain cases. As a wliole, his theory
of a liberal system ot land distribution was un-
doubtedly the correct one, and he deserves the
greatest credit for having pushed it as he did.

CHAPTER IV.

THE ELECTIOISr OF JACKSON, AND THE SPOH^S

SYSTEM.

In the presidential election of 1828 Jackson
and Adams were pitted against each other as
the only candidates before the people, and Jack-
son won an overwhelming victory. The fol-
lowers of the two were fast developing respec-
tively into Democrats and Whigs, and the
parties were hardening and taking shape, while
the dividing lines were being drawn more
clearly and distinctly. But the contest was
largely a personal one, and Jackson's success
was due to his own immense popularity more
than to any party principles which he was sup-
posed to represent. Almost the entire strength
of Adams was in the Northeast ; but it is abso-
lutely wrong to assume, because of this fact,
that the election even remotely foreshadowed
the way in which party lines would be drawn in
the coming sectional antagonism over slavery.
Adams led Jackson in the two slave states of
Maryland and Delaware ; and in the free states
outside of New England Jackson had an even

/. i

70 THOMAS HART BENTON.

greater lead over Adams. East of the Alle-
glianies it may here and there have been taken
as in some sort a triumph of the South over the
North ; but its sectional significance, as far as
it had any, really came from its being a victory
of the West over the East. Infinitely more
important than this was the fact that it repre-
sented the overwhelmingly successful upheaval
of the most extreme democratic elements in the
community.

Until 1828 all the presidents, and indeed al-
most all the men who took the lead in public
life, alike in national and in state affairs, had
been drawn from what in Europe would have
been called the *' upper classes." They were
mainly college-bred men of high social standing,
as well educated as any in the community, usu-
ally rich or at least well-to-do. Their subordi-
nates in ofiice were of much the same material.
It was believed, and the belief was acted upon,
that public life needed an apprenticeship of
training and experience. Many of our public
men bad been able ; almost all had been honor-
able and upright. The change of parties in
1800, when the Jeffersonian Democracy came
in, altered the policy of the government, but not
the character of the officials. In that move-
ment, though Jefferson had behind him the mass
of the people as the rank and file of his party,

THE ELECTION OF JACKSON. 71

yet all his captains were still drawn from among
the men in the same social position as himself.
The Revolutionary War had been fought under
the leadership of the colonial gentry ; and for
years after it was over the people, as a whole,
felt that their interests could be safely intrusted
to and were identical with those of the descend-
ants of their revolutionary leaders. The classes
in which were to be found almost all the learn-
ing, the talent, the business activity, and the
inherited wealth and refinement of the country,
had also hitherto contributed much to the body
of its rulers.

The Jacksonian Democracy stood for the re-
volt against these rulers ; its leaders, as well as
their followers, all came from the mass of the
people. The majority of the voters supported
Jackson because they felt he was one of them-
selves, and because they understood that his
election would mean the complete overthrow of
the classes in power and their retirement from
the control of the government. There was
nothing to be said against the rulers of the day ;
they had served the country and all its citizens
well, and they were dismissed, not because the
voters could truthfully allege any wrong-doing
whatsoever against them, but solely because, in
their purely private and personal feelings and
habits of life, they were supposed to differ from

72 THOMAS HART BENTON.

the mass of the people. This was such an out-
rageously absurd feeling that the very men who
were actuated by it, or who, like Benton, shaped
and guided it, w^ere ashamed to confess the true
reason of their actions, and tried to cloak it be-
hind an outcry, as vague and senseless as it was
clamorous, against '' aristocratic corruption " and
other shadowy and spectral evils. Benton even
talked loosely of " retrieving the country from
the deplorable condition in which the enlight-
ened classes had sunk it," although the country
was perfectly prosperous and in its usual state
of quiet, healthy growth. On the other hand,
the opponents of Jackson indulged in talk al-
most as wild, and fears even more extravagant
than his supporters' hopes; and the root of
much of their opposition lay in a concealed but
still existent caste antagonism to a man of Jack-
son's birth and bringing up. In fact, neither
side, in spite of all their loud talk of American
Republicanism, had yet mastered enough of its
true spirit to be able to see that so long as pub-
lic officers did their whole duty to all classes
alike, it was not in the least the affair of their
constituents whether they chose to spend their
hours of social relaxation in their shirt-sleeves
or in dress coats.

The change was a great one ; it was not a
change of the policy under which the govern-

TEE ELECTION OF JACKSON. ^ 7^^

ment was managed, as in Jefferson's triumph,
but of the men who controlled it. The two
great democratic victories had little in common ;
almost as little as had the two great leaders un-
der whose auspices they were respectively won,
— and few men were ever more unlike than the
scholarly, timid, and shifty doctrinaire, who sup-
planted the elder Adams, and the ignorant, head-
strong, and straightforward soldier, who was vic-
tor over the younger. That the change was the
deliberate choice of the great mass of the people,
and that it was one for the worse, was then,
and has been ever since, the opinion of most
thinking men ; certainly the public service then
took its first and greatest step in that downward
career of progressive debasement and deteriora-
tion which has only been checked in our own
days. But those who would, off-hand, decry the
democratic principle on this account would do
well to look at the nearly contemporaneous
career of the pet heroes of a trans-Atlantic
aristocracy before passing judgment. A very
charming English historian of our day ^ has com-
pared Wellington with Washington ; it would
have been far juster to have compared him
with Andrew Jackson. Both were men of
strong, narrow minds and bitter prejudices, with
few statesmanlike qualities, who, for brilliant

1 Justiu McCarthy.

74 THOMAS HART BENTON.

military services, were raised to the highest civil
positions in the gift of the state. The feeling
among the aristocratic classes of Great Britain
in favor of the Iron Duke was nearly as strong
and quite as unreasonable as was the homage
paid by their homelier kinsfolk across the At-
lantic to Old Hickory. Wellington's military
successes were far greater, for he had more
chances ; but no single feat of his surpassed the
remarkable victory won against his ablest lieu-
tenant and choicest troops by a much smaller
number of backwoods riflemen under Andrew
JiUikson. As a statesman Wellington may have
done less harm than Jackson, for he had less in-
fluence ; but he has no such great mark to his
credit as the old Tennessean's attitude toward
the Niillifiers. If Jackson's election is a proof
that the majority is not always right, Welling-
ton's elevation may be taken as showing that
the minority, or a fraction thereof, is in its
turn quite as likely to be wrong.

This caste antagonism was the distinguishing
feature in the election of 1828, and the partially
sectional character of the contest was due to
the different degree of development the caste
spirit had reached in different portions of the
Union. In New England wealth was quite
evenly distributed, and education and intelli-
gence were nearly universal ; so there the an-

I

THE ELECTION OF JACKSON. 75

tagonism was slight, the bulk of the New Eng-
land vote being given, as usually before and
since, in favor of the right candidate. In the
Middle States, on the contrary, the antagonism
was very strong. In the South it was of but
little political account as between the whites
themselves, they all being knit together by the
barbarous bond of a common lordship of race;
and here the feeling for Jackson was largely
derived from the close kinship still felt for the
West. In the West itself, where Jackson's
great strength lay, the people were still too
much on the same plane of thought as well as of
material prosperity, and the wealthy and culti-
vated classes were of too limited extent to ad-
mit of much caste feeling against the latter;
and, accordingly, instead of hostility to them, the
Western caste spirit took the form of hostility
to their far more numerous representatives who
had hitherto formed the bulk of the political
rulers of the East.

New England was not only the most ad-
vanced portion of the Union, as regards intelli-
gence, culture, and general prosperity, but was
also most disagreeably aware of the fact, and
was possessed with a self-conscious virtue that
was peculiarly irritating to the Westerners, who
knew that they were looked down upon, and
savagely resented it on every occasion ; and, be-

76 THOMAS BART BENTON.

sides, New England was apt to meddle in affairs
that more nearly concerned other localities.
Several of Benton's speeches, at this time, show
this irritation against the Northeast, and also
incidentally bring out the solidarity of interest
felt throughout the West. In a long and able
speech, favoring the repeal of the iniquitous
"salt tax," or high duty on imported salt (a
great hobby of his, in which, after many efforts,
he was finally successful), he brought out the
latter point very strongly, besides complaining
of the disproportionate lightness of the burden
imposed upon the Northeast by the high tariff,
of which he announced himself to be but a
moderate adherent. In common with all other
Western statesmen, he resented keenly the
suspicion with which the Northeast was then
only too apt to regard the West, quoting in one
of his speeches with angry resentment a prev-
alent New England sneer at " the savages be-
yond the Alleghanies." At the time we are
speaking of it must be remembered that many
even of the most advanced Easterners were
utterly incapable of appreciating the almost
limitless capacity of their country for growth
and expansion, being in this respect far behind
their Western brethren ; indeed, many regarded
the acquisition of any new territory in the West
with alarm and regret, as tending to make the

t

THE ELECTION OF JACKSON. 77

Union of such unwieldy size that it would break
of its own weight.

Benton was the leading opponent of a pro-
posal, introduced by Senator Foot of Connecti-
cut, to inquire into the expediency of limiting
the sales of public lands to such lands as were
then in the market. The limitation would have
been most injurious to the entire West, which
was thus menaced by the action of a New Eng-
lander, while Benton appeared as the champion
of the whole section, North and South alike,
in the speech wherein he strenuously and suc-
cessfully opposed the adoption of the resolu-
tion, and at the same time bitterly attacked
the quarter of the country from which it came,
as having from the earliest years opposed every-
thing that might advance the interests of the
people beyond the AUeghanies. Webster came
to the assistance of the mover of the measure
in a speech wherein, among other things, he
claimed for the North the merit of the passage
of the Ordinance of 1787, in relation to the
Northwest Territory, and especially of the anti-
slavery clause therein contained. But Benton
here caught him tripping, and in a very good
speech showed that he was completely mistaken
in his facts. The debate now, however, com-
pletely left the point at issue, taking a bitterly
sectional turn, and giving rise to the famous

78 THOMAS HART BENTON.

controversy between Hayne, of South Carolina,
who for the first time on the floor of the Sen-
ate announced the doctrine of nullification, and
Webster, who, in response to his antagonist,
voiced the feeling of the Union men of the
North in that wonderful and magnificent speech
known ever since under the name of the " Re-
ply to Hayne," and the calling forth of which
will henceforward be Hayne's sole title to fame.
Benton, though himself a strong Union and
anti-nullification man, was still too excited over
the subject-matter of the bill and the original
discussion over it to understand tliat the debate
had ranged off upon matters of infinitely greater
importance, and entirely failed to realize that
he had listened to the greatest piece of oratory
of the century. On the contrary, encouraged
by his success earlier in the debate, he actually
attempted a kind of reply to Webster, attack-
inir him with invective and sarcasm as an alarm-
ist, and taunting him with the memory of the
Hartford Convention, which had been held by
members of the Federalist party, to which Web-
ster himself had once belonged. Benton after-
wards became convinced that Webster's views
were by no means those of a mere alarmist, and
frankly stated that he had been wrong in his
position ; but at the time, heated by his original
grievance, as a Western man, against New Eng-

THE SPOILS SYSTEM, 79

land, he failed entirely to understand the true
drift of Hayne's speech. Much of New Eng-
land's policy to the West was certainly exces-
sively narrow-minded.

Jackson's administration derives a most un-
enviable notoriety as being the one under which
the " spoils system " became, for the first time,
grafted on the civil service of the nation ; ap- '
pointments and removals in the public service
being made dependent upon political qualifica-
tions, and not, as hitherto, upon merit or ca-
pacity. Benton, to his honor, always stoutly
opposed this system. It is unfair to assert that
Jackson was the originator of this method of
appointment ; but he was certainly its foster-
father, and more than any one else is responsi-
ble for its introduction into the affairs of the
national government. Despite all the Eastern
sneers at the " savages " of the West, it was from
Eastern men that this most effective method of
debauching political life came. The Jacksonian
Democrats of the West, when they introduced
it into the working of the federal government,
simply copied the system which they found al-
ready firmly established by their Eastern allies
in New York and Pennsylvania. For many /
years the course of politics throughout the
country had been preparing and foreshadowing
the advent of the " spoils system." The great-

80 THO^fAS HART BENTON.

est single stroke in its favor had been done at
the instigation of Crawford, when that schem-
ing politician was seeking the presidency, and,
to further his ends, he procured the passage by
Congress of a law limiting the term of service
of all public officials to four years, thus turn-
ing out of office all the fifty thousand public
' servants during each presidential term. This
law has never been repealed, every low politician
being vitally interested in keeping it as it is,
and accordingly it is to be found on the statute-
books at the present day ; and though it has the
company of some other very bad measures, it
still remains very much the worst of all, as re-
gards both the evil it has done and that which
it is still doing. This four years' limitation law
was passed without comment or protest, every
one voting in its favor, its probable working not
being comprehended in the least. Says Benton,
who, with all his colleagues, voted for it : " The
object of the law was to pass the disbursing
officers every four years under the supervision
of the appointing power, for the inspection of
their accounts, in order that defaulters might
be detected and dropped, while the faithful
should be ascertained and continued. ... It was
found to operate contrary to its intent, and to
have become the facile means of getting rid of
faithful disbursing officers, instead of retaining

THE SPOILS SYSTEM. 81

them." 1 New York has always had a low polit-\
ical standard, one or the other of its great party j
and factional organizations, and often both or /
all of them, being at^all times most unlovely /
bodies of excessively unwholesome moral tone./
Aaron Burr introduced the " spoils system "
into her state affairs, and his methods were fol-
lowed and improved upon by Marcy, Wright,
Van Buren, and all the " Albany Regency." In
1829 these men found themselves an important
constituent portion of the winning party, and
immediately, by the help of the only too will-
ing Jackson, proceeded to apply their system to
affairs at Washington. It was about this time
that, in the course of a debate in the Senate,
Marcy gave utterance to the now notorious
maxim, '' To the victors belong the spoils."

Under Adams the non-partisan character of
the public service had been guarded with a
scrupulous care that could almost be called ex-
aggerated. Indeed, Adams certainly went alto-
gether too far in his non-partisanship when it
came to appointing cabinet and other high of-
ficers, his views on such points being not only
fantastic, but absolutely wrong. The colorless
character of his administration was largely due
to his having, in his anxiety to avoid blind and .
unreasoning adherence to party, committed the
only less serious fault of paying too little heed to

82 THOMAS HART BENTON.

party ; for a healthy party spirit is prerequisite
to the performance of effective work in American
political life. Adams was not elected purely
for himself, but also on account of the men and
the principles that he was supposed to repre^
sent ; and wdien he partly surrounded himself
with men of opposite principles, he just so fai;,
though from the best of motives, betrayed his
supporters, and rightly forfeited much of their
confidence. But, under him, every public ser-
vant felt that, so long as he faithfully served
the state, his position was secure, no matter
what his political opinions might be.

With the incoming of the Jacksonians all
this changed, and terribly for the worse. A
perfect reign of terror ensued among the office-
holders. In the first month of the new adminis-
tration niore removals took place than during
all the previous administrations put together.
Appointments were made with little or no at-
tention to fitness, or even honesty, but solely
because of personal or political services. Re-
movals were not made in accordance with any
known rule at all ; the most frivolous pretexts
were sufficient, if advanced by useful politicians
who needed places already held by capable in-
cumbents. Spying and tale -bearing became
prominent features of official life, the meaner
office-holders trying to save their own heads by

THE SPOILS SYSTEM. 83

denouncing others. The very best men were un-
ceremoniously and causelessly dismissed; gray-
headed clerks, who had been appointed by the
earlier presidents, — by Washington, the elder
Adams, and Jefferson, — being turned off at an
hour's notice, although a quarter of a century's
faithful work in the public service had unfitted
them to earn their living elsewhere. Indeed,
it was upon the best and most efficient men that
the blow fell heaviest ; the spies, tale-bearers,
and tricksters often retained their positions.
In 1829 the public service was, as it always had
been, administered purely in the interest of the
people ; and the man who was styled the es-
pecial champion of the people dealt that service
the heaviest blow it has ever received.

Benton himself always took a sound stand on
the civil service question, although his partisan
ship led him at times to defend Jackson's course
when he must have known well that it was in-
defensible. He viewed with the greatest alarm
and hostility the growth of the "spoils system,"
and early introduced, as chairman of a special
committee, a bill to repeal the harmful four
years' limitation act. In discussing this pro-
posed bill afterwards, he wrote, in words that
apply as much at this time as they did then :
" The expiration of the four years' term came
to be considered as the termination and vacation

84 THOMAS HART BENTON.

of nil the offices on which it fell, and the crea-
tion of vacancies to be filled at the option of the
president. The bill to remedy this defect gave
legal effect to the original intention of the law
by confining the vacation of office to actual de-
faulters. The power of the president to dis-
miss civil officers was not attempted to be cur-
tailed, but the restraints of responsibility were
placed upon its exercise by requiring the cause
of dismission to be communicated to Congress
in each case. The section of the bill to that ef-
fect was in these words: That in all nomina-
tions made by the president to the Senate.^ to fill
vacancies occasioned by an exercise of the presi-
dent's power to remove from office^ the fact of the
removal shall be stated to the Senate at the same
time that the nomination is made., with a state-
merit of the reasons for which such officer may
have been removed. This was intended to oper-
ate as a restraint upon removals without cause."
In the " Thirty Years' View" he again writes,
in language which would be appropriate from
every advanced civil service reformer of the
present day, that is, from every disinterested
man who has studied the workings of the "spoils
system " with any intelligence : —

I consider " sweeping " removals, as now practiced
by both parties, a great political evil in our country,
injurious to individuals, to the public service, to the

!

THE SPOILS SYSTEM. 85

purity of elections, and to the harmony and union of
the people. Certainly no individual has a right to
an office ; no one has an estate or property in a public
employment ; but when a mere ministerial worker in
a subordinate station has learned its duties by ex-
perience and approved his fidelity by his conduct, it
is an injury to the public service to exchange him for
a novice whose only title to the place may be a po-
litical badge or partisan service. It is exchanging
experience for inexperience, tried ability for untried,
and destroying the incentive to good conduct by de-
stroying its reward. To the party displaced it is an
injury, he having become a proficient in that busi-
ness, expecting to remain in it during good behavior,
and finding it difficult, at an advanced age, and with
fixed habits, to begin a new career in some new walk
of life. It converts elections into scrambles for of-
fice, and degrades the government into an office for
rewards and punishments ; and divides the people of
the Union into two adverse parties, each in its turn,
and as it becomes domiuant, to strip and proscribe
the other.

Benton had now taken the position which he
was for many years to hold, as the recognized
senatorial leader of a great and well-defined
party. Until 1828 the prominent political
chiefs of the nation had either been its presi-
dents, or had been in the cabinets of these presi-
dents. But after Jackson's time they were in

86 THOMAS HART BENTON.

the Senate, and it was on this body that public
attention was concentrated. Jackson's cabinet
itself showed such a falling off, when compared
with the cabinets of any of his predecessors, as
to justify the caustic criticism that, when he
took office, there came in *' the millennium of
the minnows." In the Senate, on the contrary,
there were never before or since so many men
of commanding intellect and powers. Calhoun
bad been elected as vice-president on the Jack-
sonian ticket, and was thus, in 1829, presiding
over the body of which he soon became an act-
ive member; Webster and Clay were already
taking their positions as the leaders of the great
National Republican, or, as it was afterwards
called. Whig party.

When the rupture between Calhoun and the
Jacksonian Democrats, and the resignation of
the former from the vice-presidency took place,
three parties developed in the United States
Senate. One was composed of the Jacksonian
Democrats, with Benton at their head ; one was
made up of the little band of NuUifiers, led by
Calhoun ; and the third included the rather loose
array of the Whigs, under Clay and Webster.
The feeling of the Jacksonians towards Cal-
houn and the NuUifiers and towards Clay and
the Clay Whigs were largely those of personal

THE SPOILS SYSTEM. 87

animosity ; but they had very little of this sen-
timent towards Webster and his associates,
their differences with them being on questions
of party principle, or else proceeding from
merely sectional causes.

CHAPTER V.

THE STRUGGLE WITH THE NULLIFIERS.

During both Jackson's presidential terms he
and his adherents were engaged in two great
struggles ; that with the Nullifiers, and that
witli the Bank. Although these struggles were
in part synchronous, it will be easier to discuss

each by itself.

The nullification movemcMit in South Caro-
lina, during the latter part of the third and
early part of the fourth decades in the present
century, had nothing to do, except in the most
distant way, with slavery. Its immediate cause
was the high taritf ; remotely it sprang from
the same feelings which produced the Virginia
and Kentucky resolutions of 1798.

Certain of the Slave States, including those
which raised hemp, indigo, and sugar, were high-
tariff states ; indeed, it was not till towards the
close of the presidency of ]\Ionroe that there
had been much sectional feeling over the pohcy
of protection. Originally, while we were a
purely agricultural and mercantile people, free

I

THE STRUGGLE WITH THE NULLIFIERS. 89

trade was the only economic policy which oc-
curred to us as possible to be followed, the first
tariff bill being passed in 1816. South Carolina
then was inclined to favor the system, Calhoun
himself supporting the bill, and, his subsequent
denials to the contrary notwithstanding, dis-
tinctly advocating the policy of protection to
native industries ; while Massachusetts then and
afterwards stoutly opposed its introduction, as
hostile to her interests. However, the bill was
passed, and Massachusetts had to submit to its
operation. After 1816 new tariff laws were
enacted about every four years, and soon the
coast Slave States, except Louisiana, realized
that their working was hurtful to the interests
of the planters. New England also changed
her attitude ; and when the protective tariff bill
of 1828 came up, its opponents and supporters
were sharply divided by sectional lines. But
these lines were not such as would have divided
the states on the question of slavery. The
Northeast and Northwest alike favored the
measure, as also did all the Southern States
west of the Alleghanies, and Louisiana. It was
therefore passed by an overwhelming vote,
against the solid opposition of the belt of South-
ern coast states stretching from Virginia to
Mississippi, and including these two.

The states that felt themselves harmed by

90 THOMAS HART BENTON.

the tariff did something more than record their
disapproval by the votes of their representatives
in Congress. They nearly all, through their
legislatures, entered emphatic protests against
its adoption, as being most harmful to them and
dangerous to the Union ; and some accompanied
their protests with threats as to what would be
done if the obnoxious laws should be enforced.
They certainly had grounds for discontent. In
1828 the tariff, whether it benefited the coun-
try as a whole or not, unquestionably harmed
tlie South ; and in a federal Union it is most
unwise to pass laws which shall benefit one part
of the community to the hurt of another part,
when the latter receives no compensation. The
truculent and unyielding attitude of the ex-
treme protectionists was irritating in the ex-
treme ; for cooler men than the South Carolin-
ians might well have been exasperated at such
an utterance as that of Henry Clay, when he
stated that for the sake of the " American sys-
tem " — by whicli title he was fond of styling a
doctrine already ancient in mediicval times — he
would '* defy the South, the president and the
devil."

On the other hand, both the good and the
evil effects of the tariff were greatly exagger-
ated. Some harm to the planter states was
doubtless caused by it ; but their falling back,

THE STRUGGLE WITH THE NULLIFIERS. 91

as compared with the North, in the race for pros-
perity, was doubtless caused much more by the
presence of slavery, as Dallas, of Pennsylvania,
pointed out in the course of some very temper-
ate and moderate remarks in the Senate. Clay's
assertions as to what the tariff had done for
the West were equally ill-founded, as Benton
showed in a good speech, wherein he described ^
picturesquely enough the industries and gen- ^i
eral condition of his portion of the country, and '
asserted with truth that its revived prosperity
was due to its own resources, entirely indepen-
dent of federal aid or legislation. He said : " I
do not think we are indebted to the high tariff
for our fertile lands and our navigable rivers ;
and I am certain we are indebted to these bless-
ings for the prosperity we enjoy." " In all that
comes from the soil the people of the West are
rich. They have an abundant supply of food
for man and beast, and a large surplus to send
abroad. They have the comfortable living
which industry creates for itself in a rich soil,
but beyond this they are poor . . .They have no
roads paved or macadamized ; no canals or
aqueducts ; no bridges of stone across the in-
numerable streams ; no edifices dedicated to
eternity ; no schools for the fine arts ; not a
public library for which an ordinary scholar
would not apologize." Then he went on to

92 THOMAS HART BENTON.

speak of the commerce of the West and its
exports, '' tlie marching myriads of living ani<
mals annually taking their departure from the
heart of the Wast, defiling through the gorges
of the Cumbeiland, the Alleghany, and the
Appalachian mountains, or traversing the plains
of the South, diverging as they march, . . . and
the flying steamboats and the fleets of floating
arks, loaded with the products of the forest,
the farm, and the pasture, following the cours^^
of our noble rivers, and bearing their freights
to the great city " of New Orleans.

Unfortunately Benton would interlard even
his best speeches with theories of economics
often more or less crude, and, still worse, with
a series of classic quotations and allusions ; for
he was grievously afflicted with the rage for
, cheap pseudo-classicism that Jelferson and his
j school had borrowed from the French revolu-
tionists. Nor could he resist the temptation to
drag in allusions to some favorite hobby. The
repeal of the salt-tax was an especial favorite
of his. He was perfectly right in attacking
the tax, and deserves the greatest credit for
the persistency which finally won him the vic-
tory. But his associates, unless of a humor-
ous turn of mind, must have found his allusions
to it rather tiresome, as when, apropos of the
commerce of the Mississippi, and without any

THE STRUGGLE WITH THE NULLTFIERS. 93

possible excuse for speaking of the iniquity of
taxing salt, he suddenly alluded to New Or-
leans as " that great city which revives upon
the banks of the Mississippi the name of the
greatest of the emperors ^ that ever reigned
upon the banks of the Tiber, and who eclipsed
the glory of his own heroic exploits by giving
an order to his legions never to levy a contri-
bution of salt upon a Roman citizen ! "

It must be admitted that the tariff did some
harm to the South, and that it was natural for
the latter to feel resentment at the way in
which it worked. But it must also be re-
membered that no law can be passed which
does' not distribute its benefits more or less
unequall}^, and which does not, in all proba-
bility, work harm in some cases. Moreover,
the South was estopped from complaining of
one section being harmed by a law that bene-
fited, or was supposed to benefit, the country at
2arge, by her position in regard to the famous
embargo and non-importation acts? These in-
flicted infinitely more damage and loss in New
England than any tariff law could inflict on
South Carolina, and, moreover, were put into
execution on account of a quarrel with Eng-
land forced on by the West and South contrary
to the desire of the East. Yet the Southern-

^ Aurelian.

94 THOMAS HART BENTON.

ers were fierce in their denunciations of such
of tiie Federalists as went to the extreme in
opposition to them. Even in 1816 Massachu-
setts had been obliged to submit with good
grace to the workings of a tariff which she
deemed hostile to her interests, and which many
Southerners then advocated. Certainly, even if
the new tariff" laws were ill-advised, unjust, and
unequal in their working, yet they did not, in
the most remote degree, justify any effort to
break up the Union ; especially the South had
no business to complain when she herself had
joined in laying heavier burdens on the shoul-
ders of New England.

Complain she did, however ; and soon added
threats to complaints, and was evidently ready
to add acts to tlirrats. Georgia, at first, took
the lead in denunciation ; but South Carolina
soon surpassed lier, and finally went to the
length of advocating and preparing for separa-
tion from the Union ; a step that produced a
revulsion o^ feeling even among her fellow anti-
tariff states. The South Carolinian statesmen
now proclaimed the doctrine of nullification, —
that is, proclaimed that if any state deemed a
federal law im proper, yit could proceed to de»
clare that law null and void so far as its own
territory was concerned, — and, as a corollary,
that it had the right forcibly to prevent execu-

THE STRUGGLE WITH THE NULLIFIERS. 95

fcion of this void law within its borders. This
was proclaimed, not as an exercise of the right
of revolution, which, in the last resort, belongs,
of course, to every community and class, but as
a constitutional privilege. Jefferson was quoted '
as the father of the idea, and the Kentucky
resolutions of 1798-99, which he drew, were
cited as the precedent for the South Caroli- j
nian action. In both these last assertions '
the Nullifiers were correct. Jefferson was the
father of nullification, and therefore of seces- /
sion. He used the word " nullify " in the orig-
inal draft which he supplied to the Kentucky
legislature, and though that body struck it out
of the resolutions which they passed in 1798,
they inserted it in those of the following year.
This was done mainly as an unscrupulous party
move on Jefferson's part, and when his side
came into power he became a firm upholder of
the Union ; and, being constitutionally unable
to put a proper value on truthfulness, he even '
denied that his resolutions could be construed
to favor nullification — though they could by no >
possibility be construed to mean anything else.
At this time it is not necessary to discuss
nullification as a constitutional dogma ; it is an
absurdity too great to demand serious refuta-
tion. The United States has the same right to
protect itself from death by nullification, seces-

96 THOMAS HART BENTON.

sion, or rebellion, that a man lias to protect
himself from death by assassination. Calhoun's
hair-splitting and metaphysical disquisitions on
the constitutionality of nullification have now
little more practical interest than have the ex-
traordinary arguments and discussions of the
school-men of the Middle Ages.

But at the time they were of vital interest,
for they were words which it was known South-
Carolina was prepared to back up by deeds.
Calhoun was vice-president, the second officer
in the federal government, and yet also the
avowed leader of the most bitter disunionists.
His state supported him by an overwhelming
majority, although even within its own borders
there was an able opposition, headed by the
gallant and loyal family of the Draytons, — the
same family that afterwards furnished the cap-
tain of Farragut's flag-ship, the glorious old
Hartford. There was a strong sentiment in the
other Southern States in his favor ; the public
men of South Carolina made speech after speecli
goading him on to take even more advanced

ground.

In Washington the current at first seemed
to be all setting in favor of the Nullifiers ; they
even counted on Jackson's support, as he was
a Southerner and a states'-rights man. But he
was also a strong Unionist, and, moreover, at

THE STRUGGLE WITH THE NULLIFIERS. 97

this time, felt very bitterly towards Calhoun,
with whom he had just had a split, and had in
consequence remodeled his cabinet, thrusting
out all Calhoun's supporters, and adopting Van
Buren as his political heir, — the position which
it was hitherto supposed the great Carolina
separatist occupied.

The first man to take up the gauntlet the
Nullifiers had thrown down was Webster, in his
famous reply to Hayne. He, of course, voiced
the sentiment of the Whigs, and especially of
the Northeast, where the high tariff was re-
garded with peculiar favor, where the Union
feeling was strong, and where there was a cer-
tain antagonism felt towards the South. The
Jacksonian Democrats, whose strength lay in
the West, had not yet spoken. They were,
for the most part, neither ultra protectionists
nor absolute free-traders ; Jackson's early pres-
idential utterances had given offense to the
South by not condemning all high-tariff legisla-
tion, but at the same time had declared in favor
of a much more moderate degree of protec-
tion than suited the Whigs. Only a few weeks
after Webster's speech Jackson's chance came,
and he declared himself in unmistakable terms.
It was on the occasion of the Jefferson birth-
day banquet, April 13, 1830. An effort was
then being made to have Jefferson's birthday

98 THOMAS HART BENTON.

celebrated annually ; and the Nullifiers, rightly
claiming him as their first and chief apostle,
attempted to turn this particular feast into a
demonstration in favor of nullification. Most
of the speakers present were actively or pas-
sively in favor of the movement, and the toasts
proposed strongly savored of the new doctrine.
But Jackson, Benton, and a number of other
Union men were in attendance also, and when
it came to Jackson's turn he electrified the au-
dience by proposing : '* Our federal Union ; it
must be preserved." Calhoun at once answered
with : " The Union ; next to our liberty the
most dear ; may we all remember that it can
only be preserved by respecting the rights of
the states and distributing equally the benefit
and burden of the Union." The issue between
the president and the vice-president was now
complete, and the Jacksonian Democracy was
squarely committed against nullification. Jack-
son had risen to the occasion as only a strong
and a great man could rise, and his few, tell-
ing words, finely contrasting at every point
with Calhoun's utterances, rang throughout the
whole country, and will last as long as our gov-
ernment. One result, at least, the Nullifiers
accomplished, — they completely put an end to
the Jefferson birthday celebrations.

The South Carolinians had no intention of

THE STRUGGLE WITH THE NULLIFIERS. 99

flinching from the contest which they had pro-
voked, even when they saw that the North and
West were united against them, and though
the tide began to set the same way in their sis-
ter states of the South ; North Carolina, among
the latter, being the first and most pronounced
in her support of the president and denunci-
ation of the Nullifiers. The men of the Pal-
metto State have always ranked high for hot-
headed courage, and they soon showed that
they had wills as fiery as that of Jackson him-
self. Yet in the latter they had met an antag-
onist well worthy of any foeman's steel. In
declining an invitation to be present at Charles-
ton, on July 4, 1831, the president again defined
most clearly his position in favor of the Union,
and his words bad an especial significance be-
cause he let it be seen that he was fully deter-
mined to back them up by force if necessary.
But his letter only had the effect of inflaming
still more the minds of the South Carolinians.
The prime cause of irritation, the tariff, still a
remained ; and in 1832, Clay, having entered
tho Senate after a long retirement from poli-
tics, put the finishing stroke to their anger by
procuring the passage of a new tariff bill, which
left the planter states almost as badly off as did 1
the law of 1828. Jackson signed this, although
not believing that it went far enough in the i
reduction of duties.

LcfC.

100 THOMAS HART BENTON.

In tlie presidential election of 1832, Jackson
defeated Clay by an enormous majority ; Van
Buren was elected vice-president, there being
thus a Northern man on the ticket. Soutli
Carolina declined to take part in the election,
throwing away her vote. Again, it must be
kept in mind that the slave question did not
shape, or, indeed, enter into this contest at all,
directly, although beginning to be present in
the background as a source of irritation. In
1832 there was ten-fold more feeling in the
North against Masonry, and secret societies
generally, than there was against slavery.

Benton threw himself in, heart and soul, with
the Union party, acting as Jackson's riglit-hand
man throughout the contest with South Caro-
lina, and showing an even more resolute and un-
flinching front than Old Hickory himself. No
better or trustier ally tlian the Missouri states-
man, in a hard fight for a principle, could be
desired. He was intensely national in all liis
habits of thought ; he took a deep, personal
pride in all his country, — North, South, East,
and West. He had been very loath to believe
that anj^ movement hostile to the Union was
really on foot ; but once thoroughly convinced
of it he chose his own line of action without an
instant's hesitation.

A fortnight after the presidential election

THE STRUGGLE WITH TEE NULLIFIERH. 101

South Carolina passed her ordinance of nullifi-
cation, directed against the tariff laws generally,
and against those of 1828 and 1832 in particu-
lar. The ordinance was to take effect on Feb-
ruary 1st ; and if meantime the federal govern-
ment should make any attempt to enforce the
laws, the fact of such attempt was to end the
continuance of South Carolina in the Union.

Jackson promptly issued a proclamation )
against nullification, composed jointly by him-
self and the great Louisiana jurist and states-
man, Livingston. It is one of the ablest, as
well as one of the most important, of all Amer- %

ican state papers. It is hard to see how any
American can read it now without feeling his
veins thrill. Some claim it as being mainly the
work of Jackson, others as that of Livingston ;
it is great honor for either to have had a hand
in its production.

In his annual message the president merely
referred, in passing, to the Nullifiers, expressing
his opinion that the action in reducing the du-
ties, which the extinction of the public debt
would permit and require, would put an end to
the proceedings. As matters grew more threat-
ening, however. South Carolina making every
preparation for war and apparently not being
conciliated in the least by the evident desire in
Congress to meet her more than half-way on

102 THOMAS HART BENTON.

the tariff question, Jackson sent a special mes-
sage to both houses. He had ah-eady sent Gen-
eral Scott to Cliarleston, and had begun the
concentration of certain military and naval
forces in or near the state boundaries. He now
asked Congress to pass a measure to enable him
to deal better with possible resistance to the
laws. South Carolina having complained of the
oppressed condition in which she found herself,
owing to the working of the tariff, Jackson, in
his message, with some humor, quoted in reply
the last Thanksgiving proclamation of her gov-
ernor, wherein he dilated upon the state's un-
exampled prosperity and happiness.

It must always be kept in mind in describ-
ing the attitude of the Jacksonian Democrats
towards the Nullifiers that they were all along,
especially in the West, hostile to a very liigh
tariff. Jackson and Benton had always favored
a much lower tariff than that established in
1828 and hardly changed in 1882. It was no
change of front on their part now to advocate a
reduction of duties. Jackson and Benton both
felt that there was much ground for South Car-
olina's original complaint, although as strongly
opposed to her nullification attitude as any
Northerner. Most of the Southern senators and
representatives, though ojiposed to nullification,
were almost equally hostile to the high tariff ;

THE STRUGGLE WITH THE NULLIFIER8. 103

and very many others were at heart in sym-
pathy with nullification itself. The intensely
national and anti-separatist tone of Jackson's
declaration, — a document that might well have
come from Washington or Lincoln, and that
would have reflected high honor on either, —
though warmly approved by Benton, was very
repugnant to many of the Southern Democrats,
and was too much even for certain of the Whigs.
In fact, it reads like the utterance of some great
Federalist or Republican leader. The feeling
in Congress, as a whole, was as strong against
the tariff as it was against nullification ; and
Jackson had to take this into account, all the
more because not only was he in some degree
of the same way of thinking, but also many of.
his followers entertained the sentiment even
more earnestly.

Calhoun introduced a series of nullification
resolutions into the Senate, and defended them
strongly in the prolonged constitutional debate
that followed. South Carolina meanwhile put
off the date at which her decrees were to take
effect, so that she might see what Congress
would do. Beyond question, Jackson's firm-
ness, and the way in which he was backed up
by Benton, Webster, and their followers, was
having some effect. He had openly avowed his
intention, if matters went too far, of hanging

\

104 THOMAS HART BENTON.

Calhoun "higher than Hainan." He unques-
tionably meant to imprison him, as well as the
other South Carolina leaders, the instant that
state came into actual collision with the Union ;
and to the end of his life regretted, and with
reason, that he had not done so without waiting
for an overt act of resistance. Some historians
have treated this as if it were an idle threat;
but such it certainly was not. Jackson un-
doubtedly fully meant what he said, and would
have acted promptly had the provocation oc-
curred, and, moreover, he would have been sus-
tained by the country. He was not tlie man to
weigh minutely what would and what would
not fall just on one side or the other of the line
defining treason ; nor was it the time for too
scrupulous adherence to precise wording. Had
a collision occurred, neither Calhoun nor his
colleague would ever have been permitted to
leave Washington ; and brave though they were,
the fact unquestionably bad much influence
with them.

Webster was now acting heartily with Ben-
ton, lie introduced a set of resolutions which
showed that in the matters both of the tariff
and of nullification his position was much the
same as was that of the Missourian. Unfortu-
nately Congress, as a whole, was by no means
BO stiff-kneed. A certain number of Whigs fol-

THE STRUGGLE WITH THE NULLIFIER8. 105

lowed Webster, and a certain number of Demo-
crats clung to Benton; but most Southerners
were very reluctant to allow pressure to be
brought to bear on South Carolina, and many
Northerners were as willing to compromise as
Henry Clay himself. In accordance with Jack-
son's recommendations two bills were intro-
duced : one the so-called " Force bill," to allow
the president to take steps to defend the federal
authority in the event of actual collision ; and
the other a moderate, and, on the whole, proper
tariff bill, to reduce protective duties. Both
were introduced by administration supporters.
Benton and Webster warmly sustained the
" Force bill," which was bitterly attacked by
the Nullifiers and by most of the Southerners,
who really hardly knew what stand to take,
the leading opponent being Tyler of Virginia,
whose disunion attitude was almost as clearly
marked as that of Calhoun himself. The meas-
ure was eminently just, and was precisely what
the crisis demanded ; and the Senate finally
passed it and sent it to the House.

All this time an obstinate struggle was going
on over the tariff bill. Calhoun and his sym-
pathizers were beginning to see that there was
real danger ahead, alike to themselves, their
constituents, and their principles, if they fol-
lowed unswervingly the course they had laid

106 THOMAS HART BENTON.

down ; aiul the weak-kneed bretliren on the
other side, headed by Chiy, were becoming even
more uneasy. Calhoun wished to avert collision
with the federal government; Clay was quite as
anxious to avoid an outbreak in the South and
to save what he could of the protective system,
wiiich was evidently doomed. Calhoun was
willinix to sacritice some of his constitutional
theories in regard to proti»ction ; Clay was
ready greatly to reduce protection itself. Each
of them, but especially Clay, was prepared to
shift his stand somewhat from that of abstract
moral right to that of expediency. Benton and
Webster were too resolute and determined in
their hostility to any form of yieldiuix to South
Carolina's insolent defiance to admit any hope
of getting them to accept a compromise ; but
the majority of the members were known to be
only too ready to jump at any half-way measure
which would patch up the affair for the present,
no matter what the sacrifice of principle or how
great the risk incurred for the future. Accord-
ingly, Clay and Calhoun met and agreed on a
curious bill, in reality recognizing the protective
system, but making a great although gradual
reduction of duties; and Clay introduced this
as a *^ compromise measure." It was substi-
tuted in [\\v House for the administration tarilT
bill, wiis passed and sent to the Senate. It

THE STRUGGLE WITH THE NULLIFIERS. 107

gave South Carolina much, but not all, that
she demanded. Her representatives announced
themselves satisfied, and supported it, together
with all their Southern sympathizers. WeV^ster
and Benton fought it stoutly to the last, but it
was passed by a great majority ; a few North-
erners followed Webster, and Benton received
fair support from his Missouri colleagues and
the Maryland senators ; the other senators,
Whigs and Democrats alike, voted for the
measure. Many of the Southerners were im- ^
bued with separatist principles, although not
yet to the extent that Calhoun was ; others,
though Union men, did not possess the unflinch-
ing will and stern strength of character that
enabled Benton to stand out against any sec-
tion of the country, even his own, if it was
wrong. Silas Wright, of New York, a typical
Northern " dough-face " politician, gave exact
expression to the "dough-face" sentiment, which
induced Northern members to vote for the com-
promise, when he stated that he was unalter-
ably opposed to the principle of the bill, but
that on account of the attitude of South Caro- *
lina, and of the extreme desire which he had to
remove all cause, of discontent in that state, and
in order to enable her again to become an affec-
tionate member of the Union, he would vote
for what was satisfactory to her, although re-

108 THOMAS HART BENTON.

pugnant to himself. Wright, Marcy, and their
successors in New York politics, almost up to
the present day, certainly carried cringing sub-
serviency to the South to a pitch that was fairly
sublime.

The " Force bill " and the compromise tariff
bill passed both houses nearly simultaneously,
and were sent up to the president, who signed
both on the same day. His signing the com-
promise bill was a piece of weakness out of
keeping with his whole character, and espe-
cially out of keeping with his previous course
towards the NuUifiers. The position assumed
by Benton and Webster, that South Carolina
should be made to submit first and should have
/ the justice of her claims examined into after-
wards, was unquestionably the only proper atti-
\ tude.

Benton wrote : —

My objections to this bill, and to its mode of being
passed, were deep and abiding, and went far beyond
its own obnoxious provisions, and all the transient
and temporary considerations connected with it. . . .
A compromise made with a state in arms is a capitula-
tion to that state. . . . The injury was great then, and
a permanent evil example. It remitted the govern-
ment to the condition of the old confederation, acting
upon sovereignties instead of individuals. It violated
the feature of our Union which discriminated it from

TEE STRUGGLE WITH THE NULLIFIERS. 109

all confederacies that ever existed, and which was
wisely and patriotically put into the Constitution to
save it from the fate which had attended all con-
federacies, ancient and modern. . . . The framers of
our Constitution established a Union instead of a
League — to be sovereign and independent within its
sphere, acting upon persons through its own laws
and courts, instead of acting on communities through
persuasion or force. The effect of this compromise
legislation was to destroy this great feature of our
Union — to bring the general and state governments
into conflict — and to substitute a sovereign state for
an offending individual as often as a state chose to
make the cause of that individual her own.

• -■■■I

Not only was Benton's interpretation of the
Constitution sound, and one that by the course
of events has now come to be universally ac-
cepted, but his criticisms on the wisdom of the
compromise bill were perfectly just. Had the
Anti-Nullifiers stood firm, the NuUifiers would
probably have given way, and if not, would
certainly have been crushed. Against a solid
North and West, with a divided South, even
her own people not being unanimous, and with
Jackson as chief executive. South Carolina
could not have made even a respectable resist-
ance. A salutary lesson then might very pos-
sibly have saved infinite trouble and bloodshed
thereafter. But in Jackson's case it must be

110 THOMAS HART BENTON.

remembered that, so far as his acts depended
purely upon his own will and judgment, no
fault can be found with him ; he erred only in
ratifying a compromise agreed to by the vast
majority of the representatives of the people in
both houses of Congress.

The battle did not result in a decisive victory
for either side. This was shown by the very
fact that each party insisted that it had won a
signal triumph. Calhoun and Clay afterwards
quarreled in the senate chamber as to which
had given up the more in the compromise.
South Carolina had declared, first, that the
tariff was unconstitutional, and therefore to be
opposed upon principle ; second, that it worked
injustice to her interests, and must be abol-
ished forthwith ; thirdly, that, if it were not so
abolished, she would assert her power to nullify
a federal law, and, if necessary, would secede
from the Union. When her representatives
agreed to the compromise bill, they abandoned
the first point ; the second was decided largely
in her favor, though protection was not by any
means entirely given up ; the third she was al-
lowed to insist upon with impunity, although
the other side, by passing the " Force bill,"
showed that in case matters did proceed to ex-
tremities they were prepared to act upon the
opposite conviction. Still, she gained most of

(-

THE STRUGGLE WITH THE NULLIFIERS. Ill

that for which she contended, and the victory,
as a whole, rested with her. Calhoun's pur-
poses seem to have been, in the main, pure ;
but few criminals have worked as much harm
to their country as he did. The plea of good
intentions is not one that can be allowed to
have much weight in passing historical judg-
ment upon a man whose wroqg-headedness and
distorted way of looking at things produced, or
helped to produce, such incalculable evil ; there
is a wide political applicability in the remark
attributed to a famous Texan, to the effect that
he might, in the end, pardon a man who shot
him on purpose, but that he would surely never
forgive one who did so accidentally.

Without doubt, the honors of the nullification
dispute were borne off by Benton and Webster.
The latter's reply to Hayne is, perhaps, the
greatest single speech of the nineteenth cen-
tury, and he deserves the highest credit for the
stubbornness with which he stood by his colors
to the last. There never was any question of
Webster's courage ; on the occasions when he
changed front he was actuated by self-interest
and ambition, not by timidity. Usually he /
appears as an advocate rather than an earnest
believer in the cause he represents ; but when
it came to be a question of the Union, he felt
what he said with the whole strength of his
Tjature.

112 THOMAS HART BENTON.

An even greater meed of praise attaches to
Benton for the unswerving fidelity which lie
showed to the Union in this crisis. Webster
was a high-tariff man, and was backed up by
all the sectional antipathies of the Northeast in
his opposition to the Nullifiers ; Benton, on the
contrary, was a believer in a low tariff, or in
one for revenue merely, and his sectional an-
tipathies were the other way. Yet, even when
deserted by his chief, and when he was opposed
to ever}' senator from south of the Potomac
and the Ohio, he did not flinch for a moment
from his attitude of aggressive loyalty to the
national Union. He had a singularly strong
and upright character ; this country has never
bad a statesman more fearlessly true to his con-
victions, when great questions were at stake,
no matter what might be the cost to himself,
or the pressure from outside, — even when, as
happened later, his own state was against him.
Intellectually he cannot for a moment be com-
pared to the great Massachusetts senator ; but
morally he towers much higher.

Yet, while praising Jackson and Benton for
their behavior towards South Carolina, we can-
Hot forget that but a couple of years previously
they had not raised their voices even in the
mildest rebuke of Georgia for conduct which,
though not nearly so bad in degree as that of

IL

THE STRUGGLE WITH THE NULLIFIERS. 113

South Carolina, was of much the same kind.
Towards the close of Adams's term, Georgia
had bid defiance to the mandates of the Su-
preme Court, and proceeded to settle the In-
dian question within her borders without re-
gard to the authority of the United States, and
these matters were still unsettled when Jack-
son became president. Unfortunately he let his
personal feelings bias him ; and, as he took the
Western and Georgian view of the Indian ques-
tion, and, moreover, hated the Supreme Court
because it was largely Federalist in its compo-
sition, he declined to interfere. David Crock-
ett, himself a Union man and a nationalist to
the back-bone, rated Jackson savagely, and with
justice, for the inconsistency of his conduct in
the two cases, accusing him of having, by his
harmful leniency to Georgia, encouraged South
Carolina to act as she did, and ridiculing him
because, while he smiled at the deeds of the
one state, when the like acts were done by the
other, "he took up the rod of correction and

shook it over her."
8

CHAPTER VI.

JACKSON AND BENTON MAKE "WAR ON THE

BANK.

If the struggle with the Nullifiers showed
Benton at his best, in the conflict with the
Bank he exhibited certain qualities which
hardly place him in so favorable a light. Jack-
son's attack upon the Bank was a move under-
taken mainly on his own responsibility, and one
which, at first, most of his prominent friends
were alarmed to see him undertake. Benton
alone supported him from the beginning. Cap-
tain and lieutenant alike intensely appreciated
the joy of battle; they cared for a fight because
it was a fight, and the certainty of a struggle,
such as would have daunted weaker or more
timid men, simply offered to them an additional
inducement to follow out the course they had
planned. Benton's thorough-going support was
invaluable to Jackson. The president sorelj'-
needed a friend in the Senate who would up-
hold him through thick and thin, and who yet
commanded the respect of all his opponents by

WAR ON THE BANK. 115

his strength, ability, and courage. To be sure,
Benton's knowledge of financial economics was
not always profound ; but, on the other hand, a
thorough mastery of the laws of finance would
have been, in this fight, a very serious disad-
vantage to any champion of Jackson.

The rights and wrongs of this matter have
been worn threadbare in countless discussions.
For much of the hostility of Jackson and Ben-
ton towards the Bank, there were excellent
grounds ; but many of their actions were wholly
indefensible and very harmful in their results
to the country. An assault upon what Benton
called " the money power " is apt to be popular
in a democratic republic, partly on account of
the vague fear with which the poorer and more
ignorant voters regard a powerful institution,
whose working they do not understand, and
partly on account of the jealousy they feel to-
wards those who are better off than themselves.
When these feelings are appealed to by men
who are intensely in earnest, and who are them-
selves convinced of the justice and wisdom of
their course, they become very formidable fac-
tors in any political contest.

The struggle first became important when
the question of the re-charter of the Bank was
raised, towards the end of Jackson's first term,
the present charter still having three years to

116 THOMAS HART BENTON.

run. This charter had in it many grave faults ;
and there might well be a question as to
whether it should be renewed. The Bank it-
self, beyond doubt, possessed enormous power ;
too much power for its own or outsiders' good.
Its president, Biddle, was a man of some abil-
ity, but conceited to the last degree, untruthful,
and to a certain extent unscrupulous in the use
he made of the political influence of the great
moneyed institution over which he presided.
Some of the financial theories on which he
managed the Bank were wrong ; yet, on the
whole, it was well conducted, and under its care
the monetary condition of the country was
quiet and good, infinitely better than it had
been before, or than, under the auspices of the
Jacksonian Democracy, it afterwards became.
^ The two great reasons for Jackson's success
throughout his political career were to be found
in the strength of the feeling in his favor auiong
the poorer and least educated classes of voters,
and in the ardent support given him by the low
politicians, who, by playing on his prejudices
and passions, moulded him to their wishes, and
who organized and perfected in their owli and
his interests a great political machine, founded
on the " spoils system " ; and both the Jackso-
nian rank and file and the Jacksonian politi-
cians soon agreed heartily in their opposition

WAR ON TEE BANK. 117

to the Bank. Jackson and Benton opposed it
for the same reasons that the bulk of their fol-
lowers did ; that is to say, partly from honest
and ignorant prejudice and partly from a well-
founded feeling of distrust as to some of its ac-
tions. The mass of their fellow party-leaders
and henchmen assailed it with the cry that it
was exerting its influence to debauch politics,
while at the same time they really sought to
use it as a power in politics on their own side.__

Jackson, in his first annual message in 1829,
had hinted that he was opposed to the re-char-
ter of the Bank, then a question of the future
and not to arise for four or five years. At the
same time he had called in question the con-
stitutionality and expediency of the Bank's
existence, and had criticised as vicious its cur-
rency system. The matter of constitutionality
had been already decided by the Supreme Court,
the proper tribunal, and was, and had been for
years, an accepted fact ; it was an absurdity to
call it in question. As regards the matter of
expediency, certainly the Jacksonians failed
signally to put anything better in its place.
Yet it was undeniable that there were grave
defects in the currency system.

The president's message roused but little in-
terest, and what little it did rouse was among
the Bank's friends. At once these began to

118 THOMAS HART BENTON.

prepare the way for the re-charter by an active
and extensive agitation in its favor. The main
bank was at Philadelphia, but it bad branches
everywhere, and naturally each branch bank
was a centre of opposition to the president's
proposed policy. As the friends of the Rank
were greatly interested, and as the matter did
not immediately concern tliose who afterwards
became its foes, the former, for the time, had it
all their own way, and the drift of public opin-
ion seemed to be strongly in its favor.

Benton was almost the only public man of
prominence who tried to stem this tide from
the beginning. Jackson's own party associates
were originally largely against him, and so he
stood all the more in need of the viororous
support which he received from the IMissouri
senator. Indeed, it would be unfair in the mat-
ter of the attack on the Bank to call Benton
Jackson's follower ; he might with more pro-
priety be called the leader in the assault, al-
thougli of course he could accomplish little com-
pared with what was done by the great popular
idol. He had always been hostile to the Bank,
largely as a matter of Jeffersonian tradition,
and he had shown his hostility by resolutions
introduced in the Senate before Jackson was
elected president.

Early in 1831 he asked leave to introduce a

WAR ON THE BANK. 119

resolution against the re-charter of the Bank ;
his purpose being merely to give formal notice
of war against it, and to attempt to stir up a
current of feeling counter to that which then
seemed to be generally prevailing in its favor.
In his speech he carefully avoided laying stress
upon any such abstract point as that of consti-
tutionality, and dwelt instead upon the ques-
tions that would affect tile popular mind ; as-
sailing the Bank " as having too much power
over the people and the government, over busi-
ness and politics, and as too much disposed to
exercise that power to the prejudice of the free-
dom and equality which should prevail in a
republic, to be allowed to exist in our country."
The force of such an argument in a popular
election will be acknowledged by all practical
politicians. But, although Benton probably
believed what he said, or at any rate most of
it, he certainly ought not to have opened the
discussion of a great financial measure with
a demagogic appeal to caste prejudices. He
wished to substitute a gold currency in the place
of the existing bank-notes, and was not dis-
turbed at all as to how he would supply the
place of the Bank, saying : "I am willing to
see the charter expire, without providing any
substitute for the present Bank. I am willing
to see the currency of the federal government

120 THOMAS HART BENTON.

left to the hard money mentioned and intended
in the Constitution ; . . . every species of paper
might be left to the state authorities, unrecog-
nized by the federal government ! " Of the
beauties of such a system as the last the coun-
try later on received practical demonstration.
Some of his utterances, however, could be com-
mended to the friends of greenbacks and of dis-
honest money even at the present day, as when
he says : " Gold and silver are the best currency
for a republic ; it suits the men of middle prop-
erty and the working people best ; and if I
was going to establish a workingman's party it
should be on the basis of hard money — a hard-
money party against a paper party." The
Bank was in Philadelphia; much of the s^ock
was held in the East, and a good deal was held
abroad, which gave Benton a chance to play on
sectional feelings, as follows: "To whom is all
the power granted ? To a company of private
individuals, many of them foreigners, and the
mass of them residing in a remote and narrow
corner of the Union, unconnected by any sym-
pathy with the fertile regions of the Great Val-
ley, in which the natural power of this Union
— the power of numbers — will be found to re-
side long before the renewed term of a second
charter would expire." Among the other sen-
tences occurs the following bit of pure dema-

WAR ON TEE BANK. 121

gogic pyrotechnics: "It [the Bank] tends to
aggravate the inequality of fortunes ; to make
the rich richer and the poor poorer ; to multi-
ply nabobs and paupers ; and to deepen and
widen the gulf which separates Dives from
Lazarus. A great moneyed power is favorable
to great capitalists, for it is the principle of
money to favor money. It is unfavorable to
small capitalists, for it is the principle of money
to eschew the needy and unfortunate. It is in-
jurious to the laboring classes." Altogether it
was not a speech to be proud of. The Senate
refused permission to introduce the resolution
by the close vote of twenty-three to twenty.

Benton lived only a generation after that one
which had itself experienced oppression from a
king, from an aristocratic legislature and from
a foreign power ; and so his rant about the
undue influence of foreigners in our govern-
mental affairs, and his declamation over the
purely supposititious powers that were presumed
to be conspiring against the welfare of the
poorer classes probably more nearly expressed
his real feelings than would be the case with
the similar utterances of any leading statesman
nowadays. He was an enthusiastic believer in
the extreme Jeffersonian doctrinaire views as
to the will of the majority being always right,
and as to the moral perfection of the average

122 THOMAS HART BENTON.

voter. Like his fellow-statesmen he failed to
see the curious absurdity of supporting black
slavery, and yet claiming universal suffrage for
whites as a divine right, not as a mere matter
of expediency resulting on the whole better
than any other method. He had not learned
that the majority in a democracy has no more
right to tyrannize over a minority than, under
a different system, the latter would have to op-
press the former ; and that, if there is a moral
principle at stake, the saying that the voice of
the people is the voice of God may be quite as
untrue, and do quite as much mischief, as the
old theory of the divine right of kings. The
distinguishing feature of our American govern-
mental system is the freedom of the individual ;
it is quite as important to prevent his being
oppressed by many men as it is to save him
from the tyranny of one.

This speech on the re-charter showed a great
deal of wide reading and much information ;
but a good part of it was sheer declamation, in
the turgid, pompous style that Benton, as well
as a great many other American public speak-
ers, was apt to mistake for genuine oratory.
His subsequent speech on the currency, how-
ever, was much better. This was likewise deliv-
ered on the occasion of asking leave to present
a joint resolution, which leave was refused.

WAR ON THE BANK. 123

The branch draft system was the object of the
assault. These branch drafts were for even
sums of small denomination, circulating like
bank-notes ; they were drawn on the parent
bank at Philadelphia to the order of some offi-
cer of the branch bank and were indorsed by
the latter to bearer. Thus paper was issued at
one place which was payable at another and a
distant place ; and among other results there
ensued a constant inflation of credit. They were
very mischievous in their workings ; they had
none of the marks of convertible bank-notes or
money, and so long as credit was active there
could be no check on the inflation of the cur-
rency by them. Payment could be voluntarily
made at the branch banks whence issued, but if
it was refused the owner had only the right to
go to Philadelphia and sue the directors there.
Most of these drafts were issued at the most
remote and inaccessible branches, the payment
of them being, therefore, much delayed by dis-
tance and difficulty ; nor were the directors lia-
ble for excessive issues. They constituted the
bulk of all the paper seen in circulation ; they
were supposed to be equivalent to money, but
being bills of exchange they were merel}' nego-
tiable instruments ; they did not have the prop-
erties of bank-notes, which are constantly and
directly interchangeable with money. In their

124 THOMAS HART BENTON.

issue Biddle had laid himself open to attack;
and in defending them he certainly did not
always speak the truth, willfully concealing or
coloring facts. Moreover, his self-satisfaction
and the foolish pride in his own power, which
he could not conceal, led him into making
imprudent boasts as to the great power the
Bank could exercise over other local banks, and
over the general prosperity of the country, while
dilating upon its good conduct in not using
this power to the disadvantage of the public.
All this was playing into Benton's hands. He
showed some of the evils of the branch draft
system, although apparently not seeing others
that were quite as important. He attacked the
Bank for some real and many imaginary wrong-
doings ; and quoted Biddle himself as an author-
ity for the existence of powers dangerous to the
welfare of the state.

The advocates of the Bank were still in the
majority in both houses of Congress, and soon
began preparations for pushing through a bill
for the re-charter. The issue began to become
political. Webster, Clay, and most of the other
anti-administration men were for the Bank ; and
so when the convention of the National Repub-
licans, who soon afterwards definitely assumed
the name of Whigs, took place, tliey declared
heartily in its favor, and nominated for the

I

WAR ON THE BANK. 125

presidency its most enthusiastic supporter,
Henry Clay. The Bank itself unquestionably
preferred not to be dragged into politics ; but
Clay, thinking he saw a chance for a successful
stroke, fastened upon it, and the convention
that nominated him made the fight against
Jackson on the ground that he was hostile to
the Bank. Even had this not already been the
case no more certain method of insuring his
hostility could have been adopted.

Still, however, many of Jackson's supporters
were also advocates of re-charter ; and the bill
for that purpose commanded the majority in
Congress. Benton took the lead in organizing
the opposition, not with the hope of preventing
its passage, but " to attack incessantly, assail at
all points, display the evil of the institution,
rouse the people, and prepare them to sustain
the veto." In other words, he was preparing
for an appeal to the people, and working to
secure an anti-Bank majority in the next Con-
gress. He instigated and prepared the investi-
gation into the affairs of the Bank, which was
made in the House, and he led the harassing par-
liamentary warfare carried on against the re-
chartering bill in the Senate. He himself seems
to have superintended the preparation of the
charges which were investigated by the House.
A great flurry was made over them, Benton and

12G THOMAS BART BENTON.

all his friends claiming that they were fully
substantiated ; but the only real point scored
was that against the branch drafts. Benton,
with the majority of the committee of investi-
gation, had the loosest ideas as to what a bank
ought to do, loud though they were in denunci-
ation of what this particular Bank was alleged
to have done.

Webster made the great argument in favor
of the re-charter bill. Benton took the lead in
opposition, stating, what was probably true, —
that the bill was brought up so long before the
charter expired for political reasons, and criti-
cising it as premature ; a criticism unfortunately
applicable with even greater force to Jackson's
message. His speech was largely mere talking
against time, and he wandered widely from the
subject. Among other things he invoked the
aid of the principle of states'-rights, because the
Bank then had power to establish branches in
any state, whether the latter liked it or not, and
free from state taxation. He also appealed to
the Western members as such, insisting that the
Bank discriminated against their section of the
country in favor of the East ; the facts being
that the shrewdness and commercial morality
of the Northeast, particularly of New England,
saved them from the evils brought on the West
erners by the foolish)iess with which they abused

WAR ON THE BANK. 127

their credit and the laxness with which they
looked on monetary obligations. But in spite
of all that Benton could do the bill passed both
houses, the Senate voting in its favor by twenty-
eight ayes against twenty nays.

Jackson, who never feared anything, and was
more than ready to accept the fight which was
in some measure forced on him, yet which in
some degree he had courted, promptly vetoed
the bill in a message which stated some truths
forcibly and fearlessly, which developed some
very queer constitutional and financial theories,
and which contained a number of absurdities,
evidently put in, not for the benefit of the Sen-
ate, but to influence voters at the coming presi-
dential election. The leaders of the opposition
felt obliged to make a show of trying to pass
the bill over the veto in order to get a chance
to answer Jackson. Webster again opened the
argument. Clay made the fiercest onslaught,
assailing the president personally, besides at-
tacking the veto power, and trying to discredit
its use. But the presidential power of veto is
among the best features of our government,
and Benton had no diSiculty in making a good
defense of it ; although many of the arguments
adduced by him in its favor were entirely un-
sound, being based on the wholly groundless
ussumption that the function of the president

128 THOMAS HART BENTON.

corresponded to that of the ancient Roman
tribune of the people, and was supposed to be
exercised in the interests of the people to con-
trol the legislature — thus willfully overlooking
the fact that the legislature also was elected
by the people. When on his ultra-democratic
hobby Benton always rode very loose in the
saddle, and with little knowledge of where he
was going. Clay and Benton alike drew all
sorts of analogies between the state of affairs in
the United States and that formerly prevailing
in France, England, and above all in the much-
suffering republics of antiquity. Benton insisted
that the Bank had wickedly persuaded the West
to get in debt to it so as to have that section
in its power, and that the Western debt had
been created with a view to political engineer-
ing; the fact being that the Westerners had run
into debt purely by their own fault, and that
the Bank itself was seriously alarmed at the
condition of its Western branches. The cur-
rency being in much worse shape in the West
than in the Northeast, gold and silver naturally
moved towards the latter place ; and this result
of their own shortcomings was again held up as
a grievance of the Westerners against the Bank.
He also read a severe lecture on the interests
of party discipline to the Democrats who had
voted for the re-charter, assuring them that they

WAR ON THE BANK. 129

could not continue to be both for the Bank and
for Jackson. The Jacksonian Democracy, nom-
inally the party of the multitude, was in reality
the nearest approach the United States has ever
seen to the " one man power ; " and to break
with Jackson was to break with the Demo-
cratic party. The alternative of expulsion or
of turning a somersault being thus plainly pre-
sented to the recalcitrant members, they for
the most part chose the latter, and performed
the required feat of legislative acrobatics with
the most unobtrusive and submissive meekness.
The debate concluded with a sharp and undig-
nified interchange of personalities between the
Missouri and Kentucky senators. Clay giving
Benton the lie direct, and the latter retorting
in kind. Each side, of course, predicted the
utter ruin of the country, if the other prevailed.
Benton said that, if the Bank conquered, the
result would be the establishment of an oli-
garchy, and then of a monarchy, and finally the
death of the Republic by corruption. Webster
stated as his belief that, if the sentiments of
the veto message received general approbation,
the Constitution could not possibly survive its
fiftieth year. Webster, however, in that debate,
showed to good advantage. Benton was no
match for him, either as a thinker or as a

speaker ; but with the real leader of the Whig
9

130 ■ THOMAS HART BENTON.

party, Henry Clay, he never had much cause
to fear comparison.

All the state banks were of course rabidly in
favor of Jackson ; and the presidential election
of 1832 was largely fought on the bank issue.
In Pennsylvania, however, the feeling for the
Bank was only less strong than that for Jack-
son ; and accordingly that Boeotian community
sapiently cast its electoral votes for the latter,
while instructing its senators and representa-
tives to support the former. But the complete
and hopeless defeat of Clay by Jackson sealed
the fate of the Bank. Jackson was not even
content to let it die naturally by the lapse of
its charter. His attitude towards it so far had
been one for which much could be said ; indeed,
very good grounds can be shown for thinking
his veto proper. But of the impropriety of his
next step there could be no possible question.
Congress had passed a resolution declaring its
belief in the safety of the United States depos-
its in the Bank ; but the president, in the sum-
mer of 1833, removed these deposits and placed
them in certain state banks. He experienced
some difficulty in getting a secretary of the
treasury who would take such a step; finally
he found one in Taney.

The Bank memorialized Congress at once ;
and the anti-administration majority in the Sen.

WAR ON TEE BANK. 131

ate forthwith took up the quarrel. They first
rejected Jackson's nominations for bank direc-
tors, and then refused to confirm Taney him-
self. Two years later Jackson made the latter
Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, in which
position he lived to do even more mischief than
he had time or opportunity to accomplish as
secretary of the treasury.

Benton was the administration champion in
the Senate. Opposed to him were Webster and
Clay, as leaders of the Whigs, supported for
the time being by Calhoun. The feeling of
Clay and Calhoun against the president was
bitterly personal, and was repaid by bis ran-
corous hatred. But Webster, though he was
really on most questions even more antagonistic
to the ideas of the Jacksonian school, always
remained personally on good terms with its
leaders.

Clay introduced a resolution directing the
return of the deposits ; Benton opposed it ; it
passed by a vote of twenty-eight to eighteen,
but was lost in the House. Clay then intro-
duced a resolution demanding to know from the
president whether the paper alleged to have
been published by his authority as having been
read to the cabinet, in relation to the removal
of the deposits, was genuine or not; and, if it
Was, asking for a copy. Benton opposed the

132 THOMAS HART BENTON.

motion, which nevertheless passed. But the
president refused to accede to the demand.
Meanwhile the new departure in banking, in-
augurated by the president, was working badly.
One of the main grounds for removing the de-
posits was the allegation that they were used
to debauch politics. This was never proved
^-against the old United States Bank; but^under
/ Jackson's administration, which corrupted the
1 public service in every way, the deposits became
V fruitful sources of political reward and bribery.
Clay then introduced his famous resolution
censuring the president for his action, and sup-
ported it in a long and fiery speech ; a speech
which, like most of Clay's, was received by his
followers at the time with rapture, but in which
this generation fails to find the sign of that re-
markable ability with which his own contempo-
raries credited the great Kentuckian. He at-
tacked Jackson with fierce invective, painting
him as an unscru|)ulous tyrant, who was in-
augurating a revolution in the government of
the Union. But he was outdone by Calhoun,
who, with continual interludes of complacent
references to the good already done by the
NuUifiers, assailed Jackson as one of a band of
artful, corrupt, and cunning politicians, and
drew a picture even more lurid than Clay's of
the future of the country, and the danger of

I

J

WAR ON TEE BANK. 133

impending revolution. Webster's speeches were
more self-contained in tone. Benton was the
only Jacksonian senator who could contend with
the great NuUifier and the two great Whigs:
and he replied at length, and in much the same
style as they had spoken.

The Senate was flooded with petitions in
favor of the Bank, which were presented with
suitable speeches by the leading Whigs. Ben-
ton ridiculed the exaggerated tone of alarm in
which these petitions were drawn, and declared
that the panic, excitement, and suffering exist-
ing in business circles throughout the country
were due to the deliberate design of the Bank,
and afforded a fresh proof that the latter was a
dangerous power to the state.

The resolution of censure was at last passed
by a vote of twenty - six to twenty, and Jack-
son, in a fury, sent in a written protest against
it, which the Senate refused to receive. The
excitement all over the country was intense
throughout the struggle. The suffering, which
was really caused by the president's act, but
which was attributed by his supporters to the
machinations of the Bank, was very real ; even
Benton admitted this, although contending that
it was not a natural result of the policy pursued,
but had been artificially excited — or, as he
very clumsily phrased it, " though fictitious and

134 THOMAS HART BENTON.

forged, yet the distress was real, and did an im-
mensity of damage." Neither Jackson nor Ben-
ton yielded an inch to the outside pressure ;
the latter was the soul of the fight in Con-
gress, making over thirty speeches during the
struggle.

During the debate on receiving the presi-
dent's protest, Benton gave notice of his inten-
tion at an early day to move to expunge from
the journal the resolution of censure. This
idea was entirely his own, and he gave the
notice without having consulted anybody. It
was, however, a motion after Jackson's own
heart, as the latter now began to look upon the
affair as purely personal to himself. His party
accepted this view of the matter with a servile
alacrity only surpassed by the way in which its
leaders themselves bowed down before the mob ;
and for the next two years the state elections
were concerned purely with personal politics,
the main point at issue in the choice for every
United States senator being, whether he would
or would not support Benton's expunging reso-
lution. The whole affair seems to us so puerile
that we can hardly understand the importance
attached to it by the actors themselves. But
the men who happened at that period to be the
leaders in public affairs were peculiarly and
frankly incapable of separating in their minds

WAR ON THE BANK. 135

matters merely affecting themselves from mat-
ters affecting their constituents. Each firmly
believed that if he was not the whole state, he
was at least a most important fraction of it ;
and this was as plainly seen in Webster's colos-
sal egoism and the frank vanity of Henry Clay
as in Benton's ponderous self-consciousness and
the all-pervading personality of Andrew Jack-
son.

Some of the speeches on the expunging res-
olution show delicious, although entirely un-
conscious, humor. If there ever was a wholly
irrational state of mind it was that in which
the Jacksonians perpetually kept themselves.
Every canvass on Jackson's behalf was one of
sound, fury, and excitement, of appeal to the
passions, prejudices, and feelings, but never the
reason, of the people. A speech for him was
generally a mere frantic denunciation of what-
ever and whoever was opposed to him, coupled
with fulsome adulation of " the old hero." His
supporters rarely indeed spoke to the cool judg-
ment of the country, for the very excellent rea-
son that the cool judgment of the country was
apt to be against them. Such being the case,
it is amusing to read in Benton's speech on re-^
ceiving the protest the following sentences, ap-
parently uttered in solemn good faith, and with
sublime unconsciousness of irony : —

136 THOMAS HART BENTON.

To such a community [the American body poli-
tic] — in an appeal on a great question of constitu-
tional law to the understandings of such a people —
declamation, passion, epithets, opprobrious language,
will stand for nothing. They will float harmless and
unheeded through the empty air, and strike in vain
upon the ear of a sober and dispassionate tribunal.
Indignation, real or affected ; wrath, however hot ;
fury, however enraged ; asseverations, however vio-
lent ; denunciation, however furious, will avail noth-
ing. Facts, inexorable facts, are all that will be at-
tended to; reason, calm and self-possessed, is all
that will be listened to.

The description of the mass of Jacksonian
voters as forming " a sober and dispassionate
tribunal " is an artistic touch of fancy quite
unique, but admirably characteristic of Benton,
whose statements always rose vigorously to the
necessities of the occasion.

Webster, in an effort to make the best of un-
toward circumstances, brought in a bill to re-
cbarter the Bank for a short period, at the
same time doing away with some of the features
that were objectionable in the old charter. This
bill might have passed, had it not been opposed
by the extreme Bank men, including Clay and
Calhoun. In the course of the debate over it
Benton delivered a very elaborate and carefully
Btudied speech in favor of hard money and a

WAR ON TEE BANK. 137

currency of the precious metals ; a speech which
is to this day well worth careful reading. Some
of his financial theories were crude and con-
fused ; but on the main question he was per-
fectly sound. Both he and Jackson deserve
great credit for having done much to impress
the popular mind with the benefit of hard, that
is to say honest, money. Benton was the strong-
est hard-money man then in public life, being,
indeed, popularly nicknamed " Old Bullion."
He thoroughly appreciated that a metallic cur-
rency was of more vital importance to the la-
boring men and to men of small capital gen-
erally than to any of the richer classes. A
metallic currency is always surer and safer than
a paper currency ; where it exists a laboring
man dependent on his wages need fear less than
any other member of the community the evils
of bad banking. Benton's idea of the danger
to the masses from " the money power '' was
exaggerated ; but in advocating a sound gold
currency he took the surest way to overcome
any possible dangerous tendency. A craze for
'* soft," or dishonest, money — a greenback
movement, or one for short weight silver dol-
lars — works more to the disadvantage of the
whole mass of the people than even to that of
the capitalists ; it is a move directly in the in-
terests of " the money power," which its loud-

138 THOMAS HART BENTON,

mouthed advocates are ostensibly opposing in
the interests of democracy.

Benton continued his speeches. The panic
was now subsiding ; there had not been time
for Jackson's ruinous policy of making deposits
in numerous state banks, and thereby encour-
aging wild inflation of credit, to bear fruit and,
as it afterwards did, involve the whole country
in financial disaster. Therefore Benton was
able to exult greatly over the favorable show-
ing of affairs in the report of the secretary of
the treasury. He also procured the passage of
a gold currency law, which, however, fixed the
ratio of value between gold and silver at sixteen
to one ; an improper proportion, but one which
had prevailed for three centuries in the Spanish-
American countries, from which he copied it.
In consequence of this law gold, long banished,
became once more a circulating medium of ex-
change.

The Bank of the United States afterwards
was turned into the State Bank of Pennsylvania ;
it was badly managed and finally became in-
solvent. The Jacksonians accepted its down-
fall as a vindication of their policy ; but in re-
ality it was due to causes not operative at the
time of the great struggle between the president
and the Senate over its continued existence.
Certainly by no possible financial policy could

WAR ON THE BANK. 139

it have produced such widespread ruin and dis-
tress as did the system introduced by Jackson.

Long after the Bank controversy had lost all
practical bearing it continued to be agitated by
the chief parties to it, who still felt sore from
the various encounters. Jackson assailed it
again in his message ; a friendly committee of
the Senate investigated it and reported in its
favor, besides going out of their way to rake up
charges against Jackson and Benton. The lat-
ter replied in a long speech, and became in-
volved in personalities with the chairman, Ty-
ler of Virginia. Neither side paid attention to
any but the partisan aspect of the question, and
the discussions were absolutely profitless.

The whole matter was threshed over again
and again, long after nothing but chaff was left,
during the debates on Benton's expunging reso-
lution. Few now would defend this resolution.
The original resolution of censure may have
been of doubtful propriety ; but it was passed,
was entered on the record, and had become a
part of the journal of the Senate. It would
have been perfectly proper to pass another reso-
lution condemning or reversing the original one,
and approving the course of the president ; but
it was in the highest degree improper to set
about what was in form falsifying the record.
Still, Benton found plenty of precedents in the

V

140 THOMAS HART BENTON,

annals of other legislative bodies for what he
proposed to do, and the country, as a whole,
backed him up heartily. He was further stim-
ulated by the knowledge that there was prob-
ably no other legislative act in which Jackson
took such intense interest, or which could so
gratify his pride ; the mortification to Clay and
Calhoun would be equally great. Benton's mo-
tion failed more than once, but the complexion
of the Senate was rapidly changed by the vari-
ous states substituting Democratic for Whig or
anti-Jackson senators. Some of the changes
were made, as in Virginia, by senators refusing
to vote for the expunging resolution, as required
by the state legislatures, and then resigning
their seats, pursuant to a ridiculous theory of
the ultra Democrats, which, if carried out, would
completely nullify the provision for a six year's
senatorial term. Finally, at the very close of
Jackson's administration, Benton found himself
with a fair majority behind him, and made the
final move. His speech was of course mainly
filled with a highly colored account of the bless-
ings wrought for the American people by An-
drew Jackson, and equally of course the latter
was compared at length to a variety of ancient
Roman worthies. The final scene in the Senate
had an element of the comic about it. The ex-
pungers held a caucus and agreed to sit the

WAR ON TEE BANK. 141

session out until the resolution was passed ; and
with prudent forethought Benton, well aware
that when hungry and tired his followers might
show less inflexibility of purpose, provided in
an adjoining committee-room *'an ample sup-
ply of cold hams, turkeys, rounds of beef, pickles,
wines, and cups of hot coffee," wherewith to in-
spirit the faint-hearted.

Fortified by the refreshments, the expungers
won a complete victory. If the language of
Jackson's admirers was overdrawn and strained
to the last degree in lauding him for every vir-
tue that he had or had not, it must be remem-
bered that his opponents went quite as far
wrong on the other side in their denunciations
and extravagant prophecies of gloom. Webster
made a very dignified and forcible speech in
closing the argument against the resolution, but
Calhoun and Clay were m uch less moderate, —
the latter drawing a vivid picture of a rapidly
approaching reign of lawless military violence,
and asserting that his opponents had '* extin-
guished one of the brightest and purest lights
that ever burnt at the altar of civil liberty." As
a proper finale Jackson, to show his apprecia-
tion, gave a great dinner to the expungers and
their wives, Benton sitting at the head of the
table. Jackson and Benton solemnly thought
that they were taking part in a great act of jus'

I

142 THOMAS HART BENTON.

tice, and were amusingly unable to see the comic
side of their acts. They probably really be-
lieved most of tlieir own denunciations of the
Bank, and very possibly thought that the wick-
edness of its followers might tempt them to do
any desperate deed. At any rate they enjoyed
posing alike to themselves and to the public as
persons of antique virtue, who had risked both
life and reputation in a hazardous but success-
ful attempt to save the liberties of the people
from the vast and hostile forces of the aristo-
cratic " money power."

The best verdict on the expunging resolution
was given by Webster when he characterized
the whole affair as one which, if it were not re-
garded as a ruthless violation of a sacred instru-
ment, would appear to be little elevated above
the character of a contemptible farce.

li

CHAPTER VII.
THE DISTKIBUTION OF THE SURPLUS.

Benton was supremely self-satisfied with the
part he had played in the struggle with the
Bank. But very few thinking men would now
admit that his actions, as a whole, on the occa-
sion in question, were to his credit, although in
the matter of the branch drafts he was per-
fectl}^ right, and in that of the re-charter at least
occupied defensible ground. His general views
on monetary matters, however, were sound,
and on some of the financial questions that
shortly arose he occupied a rather lonely pre-
eminence of good sense among his fellow sena-
tors ; such being particularly the case as regards
the various mischievous schemes in relation to
disposing of the public lands, and of the money
drawn from their sale. The revenue derived
from all sources, including these sales of public
lands, had for some years been much in excess
of the governmental expenses, and a surplus
had accumulated in the treasury. This surplus
worked more damage than any deficit would
have done.

144 THOMAS HART BENTON.

There were gold mines in the Southern States,
which had been growing more and more produc-
tive ; and, as the cost of freighting the bul-
lion was excessive, a bill was introduced to
establish branch mints at New Orleans and in
the gold regions of Georgia and North Carolina.
Benton advocated this strongly, as a constitu-
tional right of the South and West, and as
greatly in the interest of those two sections;
and also as being another move in favor of a
hard-money currency as opposed to one of pa-
per. There was strong opposition to the bill ;
many of the Whigs having been carried so far
by their heated devotion to the United States
Bank in its quarrel that they had become paper-
money men. But the vote was neither sectional
nor partisan in its character. Clay led the op-
position, while Webster supported Benton.

Before this time propositions to distribute
among the states the revenue from the public
lands had become common ; and they were suc-
ceeded by propositions to distribute the lands
themselves, and then by others to distribute all
the surplus revenue. Calhoun finally introduced
an amendment to the Constitution to enable the
surplus in the treasury during the next eight
years to be distributed among the various states-,
the estimate being that for the time mentioned
there would be about nine millions surplus an«

THE DISTRIBUTION OF THE SURPLUS. 145

nually. Benton attacked the proposal very
ably, showing the viciousness of a scheme wliich
would degrade every state government into the
position of a mendicant, and would allow money
to be collected from the citizens with one hand
in order to be given back to them with the
other; and also denying that the surplus would
reach anything like the dimensions indicated.
He ridiculed the idea of making a constitutional
amendment to cover so short a period of time ;
and stated that he would greatly prefer to see
the price paid for public lands by incoming
settlers reduced, and what surplus there was
expended on strengthening the defenses of the
United States against foreign powers. This
last proposition was eminently proper. We
were then, as always, in our chronic state of
utter defenselessness against any hostile attack,
and yet were in imminent danger of getting em-
broiled with at least one great power — France.
Our danger is always that we shall spend too
little, and not too much, in keeping ourselves
prepared for foreign war. Calhoun's resolution
was a total failure, and was never even brought
to a vote.

Benton's proposed method of using the sur-
plus came in with peculiar propriety on account
of the conduct of the Whigs and NuUifiers in
joining to oppose the appropriation of three mil-

10

146 THOMAS EART BENTON.

lions of dollars for purposes of defense, which
was provided for in the general fortification
bill. The House passed this bill by a great ma-
jority. It was eminently proper that we should
at once take steps to provide for the very pos-
sible contingency of a war with France, as the
relations witli that power were growing more
threatening every day ; but the opposition of
the anti-Jackson men to the administration and
to all its measures had become so embittered
that they were willing to run the risk of seri-
ously damaging the national credit and honor,
if they could thereby score a point against their
political adversaries. Accordingly, under the
lead of Webster, Clay, and Calhoun, they de-
feated the bill in the Senate, in spite of all that
could be done to save it by Benton, who, what-
ever his faults, was always patriotic. The ap-
propriation had been very irregular in form,
and under ordinary circumstances there would
have been good justification for inquiring into
it before permitting its passage ; but under the
circumstances its defeat at the moment was
most unfortunate. For the president had been
pressing France, even to the point of tolerably
plain threats, in order to induce or compel her
to fulfill the conditions of the recent treaty by
which she had bound herself to pay a consider,
able indemnity, long owing by her to the United

THE DISTRIBUTION OF THE SURPLUS. 147

States for depredations on our commerce. Now
she menaced war, avowedly on the ground that
we were unprepared to resist her ; and this vote
in the Senate naturally led the French govern-
ment to suppose that Jackson was not sustained
by the country in the vigorous position which
he had assumed. In speaking on the message
of the president which alluded to this state of
affairs, Benton strongly advocated our standing
firmly for our rights, making a good speech,
which showed much historical learning. He
severely reproached the anti-administration sen-
ators for their previous conduct in causing the
loss of the defense appropriation bill, and for
preferring to do worse than waste the surplus
by distributing it among the different states in-
stead of applying it according to the provisions
of that wise measure.

This brought on a bitter wrangle, in which
Benton certainly had the best of it. Calhoun
was in favor of humiliating non-resistance ; he
never advocated warlike measures when the
dignity of the nation was at stake, fond though
he was of threatening violence on behalf of
slavery or that form of secession known as
nullification. Benton quoted from speeches in
the French Chamber of Deputies to show that
the French were encouraged to take the posi-
tion that they did on account of the action of

148 THOMAS HART BENTON.

the Senate, and the disposition shown by a
majority among the senators rather to pull
down the president in a party struggle than
to uphold him in his efforts to save the na-
tional honor in a contest with France. A cu-
rious feature of his speech was that in which
he warned the latter power that, in the event
of a conflict, it would have to do with a branch
of the same race which, " from the days of
Agincourt and Crecy, of Blenheim and Ramil-
lies, down to the days of Salamanca and Wa-
terloo, has always known perfectly well how
to deal with the impetuous and fiery courage
of the French." This sudden out-cropping of
what, in Bentonian English, might be called
Pan-Anglo-Saxon sentiment was all the more
surprising inasmuch as both Benton himself
and the party to which he belonged were
strongly anti-English in their way of looking
at our foreign policy, at least so far as North
America was concerned. In the end France
yielded, though trying to maintain her dignity
by stating that she had not done so, and the
United States received what was due them.

Benton strongly opposed the payment by the
United States of the private claims of its citi-
zens for damages arising from the French spo-
liations at the end of the last century. He
pointed out that the effort to pay such claims,

THE DISTRIBUTION OF THE SURPLUS. 149

scores of years after the time of their accru-
ing, rarely benefits any of the parties origi-
nally in interest, and can only do real service
to dishonest speculators. His speech on this
matter would not be bad reading for some of
the pension-jobbing congressmen of the present
day, and their supporters ; but as concerned
these French claims he could have been easily
answered.

In the controversy over the bill introducd
by Clay, to distribute the revenue derived from
the public lands among the states for the next
five years, Benton showed to great advantage
compared both to the introducer of the bill him-
self, and to Webster, his supporter. He had
all along taken the view of the land question
that would be natural to a far-seeing Western
statesman desirous of encouraging immigration.
He wished the public lands to be sold in small
parcels to actual settlers, at prices that would
allow any poor man who was thrifty to take up
a claim. He had already introduced a bill to
sell them at graduated prices, the minimum
being established at a dollar and twenty-five
cents an acre; but if land remained unsold at
this rate for three years it was then to be sold
for what it would bring in the market. This
bill passed the Senate, but failed in the House.

In opposing Clay s distribution scheme Ben-

150 THOMAS HART BENTON.

ton again brought forward his plan of using the
surplus to provide for the national defenses ;
and in his speech showed the strongly national
turn of his mind, saying : —

lu this great system of national defense the whole
Union is equally interested ; for the couutry, iu all
that concerns its defenses, is but a unit, and every
section is interested in the defense of every other sec-
tion, and every individual citizen is interested in the
defense of the whole population. It is in vain to say
that the navy is on the sea, and the fortifications on
the sea-board, and that the citizens in the interior
states, or in the valley of the Mississippi, have no
interest in these remote defenses. Such an idea is
mistaken and delusive ; the inhabitant of Missouri or
of Indiana has a direct interest in keeping open the
mouths of the rivers, defending the sea-port towns,
and preserving a naval force that will protect the pro-
duce of his labor in crossing the ocean and arriving
safely in foreign markets.

Benton's patriotism always included the
whole country in spite of the strength of his
local sympathies.

The bill passed the Senate by a rather close
vote, and went to the House, where it soon be-
come evident that it was doomed to failure.
There was another bill, practically of much the
same import, before the Senate, providing for
the distribution of the surplus among the states

THE DISTRIBUTION OF THE SURPLUS. 151

in proportion to their electoral votes, but omit-
ting the excellent proviso concerning the de-
fenses. To suit the views of Calhoun and the
sticklers for strict construction generally, the
form of this rival bill was changed, so that
the '^ distribution " purported to be a "deposit"
merely ; the money being norn^nally only loaned
to the states, who pledged their faith to return
it when Congress should call for it. As it was
of course evident that such a loan would never
be repaid, the substitution of " deposit " for
"distribution" can only be regarded as a ver-
bal change to give the doctrinaires a loop-hole
for escape from their previous position ; they
all took advantage of it, and the bill received
overwhelming support, and was passed by both
houses.

Benton, however, stood out against it to the
last, and in a very powerful speech foretold the
evils which the plan would surely work. He
scornfully exposed the way in which some of
the members were trying, by a trick of word-
ing, to hide the nature of the bill they were
enacting into a law, and thus to seem to justify
themselves for the support they were giving it.
'" It is in name a deposit ; in form, a loan ; in
essence and design, a distribution," said Benton.
He ridiculed the attitude of the hair-splitting
strict constructionists, like Calhoun, who had

152 THOMAS HART BENTON.

always pretended most scrupulously to respect
the exact wording of the Constitution, and who
had previous!}^ refused to vote for distribution
on the ground that it was unconstitutional : —

At the commencement of the present session a
proposition was made [by Calhoun] to amend the
Constitution, to permit this identical distribution to be
made. That proposition is now upon our calendar,
for the action of Congress. All at once it is discov-
ered that a change of name will do as well as a
change of the Constitution. Strike out the word
" distribute " and insert the word " deposit," and in-
continently the impediment is removed; the consti-
tutional difficulty is surmounted, and the distribution
can be made.

He showed that to the states themselves the
moneys distributed would either be useless, or
else — and much more probably — they would be
fruitful sources of corruption and political de-
bauchery. He was quite right. It would have
been very much better to have destroyed the
surplus than to have distributed it as was act-
ually done. None of the states gained any real
benefit by the transaction ; most were seriously
harmed. At the best, the money was squan-
dered in the rage for public improvements tliat
then possessed the whole people ; often it was
stolen outright, or never accounted for. In
the one case, it was an incentive to extrava-

THE DISTRIBUTION OF THE SURPLUS. 153

gance ; in the other, it was a corruption fund.
Yet the popular feeling was strongly in favor
of the measure at the time, and Benton was
almost the only public man of note who dared
to resist it. On this occasion, as in the clos-
ing act of the struggle with the Nullifiers, he
showed more backbone than did his great
chief ; for Jackson signed the bill, although
criticising it most forcibly and pungently.

The success of this measure naturally encour-
aged the presentation of others. Clay attempted
to revive his land-money distribution bill, but
was defeated, mainly through Benton's efforts.
Three or four other similar schemes, including
one of Calhoun's, also failed. Finally a clause
providing for a further " deposit " of surplus
moneys with the states was tacked to a bill ap-
propriating money for defenses, thereby loading
it down so that it was eventually lost. In the
Senate the " deposit " amendment was finally
struck out, in spite of the opposition of Clay,
Calhoun, and Webster. Throughout the whole
discussion of the distribution of the surplus
Benton certainly shines by comparison with
any one of his three great senatorial rivals.

He shows to equally great advantage com-
pared to them in the part taken by him in ref-
erence to Jackson's so-called specie circulars.
The craze for speculation had affected the sales

154 THOMAS HART BENTON.

of public lands, which were increasing at an
extraordinary rate, nearly twenty-five million
dollars' worth being sold in 1836. As a rule,
the payments were made in the notes of irre-
sponsible banks, gotten up in many cases by the
land speculators themselves. The sales were
running up to five millions a month, with pros-
pect of a boundless increase, so that all the public
land bade fair to be converted into inconverti-
ble paper. Benton had foreseen the evil results
attending such a change, and, though well
aware that he was opposing powerful interests
in his own section of the country, had already
tried to put a stop to it by law. In his speech
he had stated that the unprecedented increase
in the sale of public lands was due to the
accommodations received by speculators from
worthless banks, whose notes in small denomi-
nations would be taken to some distant part of
the country, whence it would be a long time
before they were returned and presented for
payment. The speculators, with paper of which
the real value was much below par, could out-
bid settlers and cultivators who could only
offer specie, or notes that were its equivalent.
He went on to say that " the effect was equally
injurious to every interest concerned — except
the banks and the speculators : it was injurious
to the treasury, which was filling up with paper ;

THE DISTRIBUTION OF THE SURPLUS. 155

to the new states, which were flooded with
paper ; and to settlers and cultivators, who were
outbid by speculators loaded with this bor-
rowed paper. A return to specie payments for
lands was the remedy for all these evils."

Benton's reasoning was perfectly sound. The
effects on settlers, on the new states, and on
the government itself were precisely such as he
described, and the proposed remedy was the
vi'^ht one. But his bill failed ; for the Whigs,
including even Webster, had by this time
worked themselves up until they were fairly
crazy at the mere mention of paper -money
banks.

Jackson, however, not daunted by the fate of
the bill, got Benton to draw up a treasury order,
and had it issued. This served the same pur-
pose, as it forbade the land-offices to receive
anything but gold and silver in payment for
land. It was not issued until Congress had ad-
journed, for fear that body might counteract it
by a law ; and this was precisely what was
attempted at the next session, when a joint
resolution was passed rescinding the order, and
practically endeavoring to impose the worthless
paper currency of the states upon the federal
government. Benton stood almost alone in the
fight he made against this resolution, although
the right of the matter was so plainly on his

156

THOMAS BART BENTON.

side. In his speech he foretold clearly the
coming of the great financial crisis that was
then near at hand. The resolution, however,
amounted to nothing, as it turned out, for it
was passed so late in the session that the presi-
dent, by simply withholding his signature from
itj was enabled to prevent it from having effect»

CHAPTER VIII.

THE SLAVE QUESTION APPEARS IN POLITICS.

Towards the close of Jackson's administra-
tion, slavery for the first time made its perma-
nent appearance in national politics ; although
for some years yet it had little or no influence
in shaping the course of political movements.
In 1833 the abolition societies of the North
came into prominence ; they had been started a
couple of years previously.

Black slavery was such a grossly anachronistic
and un-American form of evil, that it is difiicult
to discuss calmly the efforts to abolish it, and
to remember that many of these efforts were
calculated to do, and actually did, more harm
than good. We are also very apt to forget that
it was perfectly possible and reasonable for en-
lightened and virtuous men, who fully recog-
nized it as an evil, yet to prefer its continuance
to having it interfered with in a way that would
produce even worse results. Black slavery in
Hayti was characterized by worse abuse than
ever was the case in the United States ; yet,

158 THOMAS HART BENTON.

looking at the condition of that repubhc now,
it njay well be questioned whether it would not
have been greatly to her benefit in the end to
have had slavery continue a century or so
longer, — its ultimate extinction being certain,
— rather than to have had her attain freedom
as she actually did, with the results that have
flowed from her action. When an evil of colos-
sal size exists, it is often the case that there is
no possible way of dealing with it that will not
itself be fraught with baleful results. Nor can
the ultra -philanthropic method be always, or
even often, accepted as the best. If there is one
question upon which the pliilanthrophists of
the present day, especially the more emotional
ones, are agreed, it is that any law restricting
Chinese immigration is an outrage ; yet it seems
incredible that any man of even moderate intel-
ligence should not see that no greater calamity
could now befall the United States than to have
the Pacific slope fill up with a Mongolian popu-
lation.

The cause of the Abolitionists has had such a
halo shed round it by tlie after course of events,
which they themselves in reality did ver}' little
to shape, that it has been usual to speak of
them with absurdly exaggerated praise. Their
courage, and for the most part their sincerit}',
cannot be too highly spokei? of, but their share

/

^ .

SLAVE QUESTION APPEARS IN POLITICS. 159

in abolishing slavery was far less than has com-
monly been represented ; any single non-aboli«
tionist politician, like Lincoln or Seward, did
more than all the professional Abolitionists com-
bined really to bring about its destruction. The
abolition societies were only in a very restricted
degree the causes of the growing feeling in the
North against slavery ; they are rather to be re-
garded as themselves manifestations or accom-
paniments of that feeling. The anti-slavery out-
burst in the Northern States over the admission
of Missouri took place a dozen years before
there was an abolition society in existence ; and
the influence of the professional abolitionists
upon the growth of the anti-slavery sentiment
as often as not merely warped it and twisted it
out of proper shape, — as when at one time they
showed a strong inclination to adopt disunicm
views, although it was self-evident that by no
possibility could slavery be abolished unless the
Union was preserved. Their tendency towards
impracticable methods was well shown in the
position they assumed towards him who was
not only the greatest American, but also the
greatest man, of the nineteenth century ; for dur-
ing all the terrible four years that sad, strong,
patient Lincoln worked and suffered for the
people, he had to dread the influence of the ex-
treme Abolitionists only less than that of the

160 THOMAS HART BENTON.

Copperheads. Many of their leaders possessed
no good qualities beyond their fearlessness and
truth — qualities that were also possessed by
the Southern fire-eaters. They belonged to
that class of men that is always engaged in
some agitation or other ; only it happened that
in this particular agitation they were right.
Wendell Phillips may be taken as a very good
type of the whole. His services against slavery
prior to the war should always be remembered
with gratitude ; but after the war, and until
the day of his death, his position on almost
every public question was either mischievous or
ridiculous, and usually both.

When the abolitionist movement started it
was avowedly designed to be cosmopolitan in
character; the originators looked down upon
any merel}' national or patriotic feeling. This
again deservedly took away from their influ-
ence. In fact, it would have been most un-
fortunate had the majority of the Northerners
been from the beginning in hearty accord with
the Abolitionists ; at the best it would have re-
sulted at that time in the disruption of the
Union and the perpetuation of slavery in the
South.

But after all is said, the fact remains, that on
the main issue the Abolitionists were at least
working in the right direction. Sooner or later,

SLAVE QUEST JON APPEARS IN POLITICS. 161

by one means or another, slavery had to go.
It is beyond doubt a misfortune that in cer-
tain districts the bulk of the population should
be composed of densely ignorant negroes, often
criminal or vicious in their instincts ; but such
is the case, and the best, and indeed the only
proper course to pursue, is to treat them with
precisely the same justice that is meted out to
whites. The effort to do so in time immedi-
ately past has not resulted so successfully as
was hoped and expected ; but nevertheless no
other way would have worked as well.

Slavery was chiefly responsible for the streak
of coarse and brutal barbarism which ran
through the Southern character, and which
marked the ferocious outcry instantly raised
by the whole Southern press against the Abo-
litionists. There had been an abortive negro
rising in Virginia almost at the same time that
the abolitionist movement first came into prom-
inence ; and this fact added to the rage and ter-
ror with which the South regarded the latter.
The clamor against the North was deafening ;
and though it soon subsided for the time being,
it never afterwards entirely died away. As
has been shown already, there had always been
a strong separatist feeling in the South ; but
hitherto its manifestations had been local and

sporadic, never affecting all the states at the
11

162 THOMAS HART BENTON.

same time ; for it bad never happened that the
cause which called forth any particular mani-
festation was one bearing on the whole South
alike. The alien and sedition laws were more
fiercely resented in Virginia and Kentucky than
in South Carolina ; the tariff, which so angered
the latter, pleased Louisiana ; and Georgia and
Alabama alone were affected by the presence
of great Indian communities within their bor-
ders. But slavery was an interest common to
the whole South. When it was felt to be in any
way menaced, all "Southerners came together
for its protection ; and, from the time of the
rise of the Abolitionists onward, the separatist
movement throughout the South began to iden-
tify itself with the maintenance of slavery,
and gradually to develop greater and greater
strength. Its growth was furthered and has-
tened by the actions of the more ambitious and
unscrupulous of the Southern politicians, who
saw that it offered a chance for them to push
themselves forward, and who were perfectly
willing to wreak almost irreparable harm to
the nation if by so doing they could advance
their own selfish interests. It was in reference
to these politicians that Benton quoted with
approval a letter from ex-President Madison,
which ran : —

SLAVE QUEST/ON APPEARS IN POL /TICS. 163

The danger is not to be concealed, that the sym-
pathy arising from known causes, and the inculcated
impression of a permanent incom[)atihility of inter-
ests between the South and the North may put it in
the power of popular leaders, aspiring to the highest
stations, to unite the South, on some critical occasion,
in a course that will end by creating a new theatre
of great, though inferior, interest. In pursuing this
course the first and most obvious step is nullification,
the next secession, and the last a farewell separation.

This was a pretty good forecast of the crisis
that was precipitated by the greedy and reck-
less ambition of the secessionist leaders in 1860.
The moral difference between Benedict Arnold
on the one hand, and Aaron Burr or Jefferson
Davis on the other, is precisely the difference
that obtains between a politician who sells his
vote for money and one who supports a bad
measure in consideration of being given some
high political position.

The Abolitionists immediately contrived to
bring themselves before the notice of Congress
in two ways ; by the presentation of petitions
for the abolition of slavery in the District of
Columbia, and by sending out to the Southern
States a shoal of abolition pamphlets, news-
papers, and rather ridiculous illustrated cuts.
What the precise point of the last proceeding
was no one can tell ; the circulation of such

164 THOMAS HART BENTON.

writings as theirs in the South could not pos-
sibly serve any good purpose. But they had a
right to send what they wished, and the conduct
of many of the Southerners in trying to get a
federal law passed to prohibit their writings
from being carried in the mail was as wrong as
it was foolish ; while the brutal clamor raised
in the South against the whole North as well
as against the Abolitionists, and the conduct
of certain Southern legislatures in practically
setting prices on the heads of the leaders in
the objectionable movement, in turn angered
the North and gave the Abolitionists tenfold
greater strength than they would otherwise
have had.

The question first arose upon the presentation
of a perfectly proper and respectful petition
sent to the Senate by a society of Pennsylvania
Quakers, and praying for the abolition of slaver}^
in the District of Columbia. The District was
solely under the control of Congress, and was
the property of the nation at large, so that Con-
gress was the proper and the only body to which
any petition concerning the affairs of the Dis-
trict could be sent ; and if the right of petition
meant an3^thing, it certainly meant that the
people, or any portion thereof, should have the
right to petition their representatives in regard
to their own affairs. Yet certain Southern ex-

SLAVE QUESTION APPEARS IN POLITICS. 165

tremists, under the lead of Calhoun, were anx-
ious to refuse to receive the paper. Benton
voted in favor of receiving it, and was followed
in his action by a number of other Southern
senators. He spoke at length on the subject,
and quite moderately, even crediting the peti-
tioners, or many of them, with being " good peo=
pie, aiming at benevolent objects, and endeav-
oring to ameliorate the condition of one part of
the human race, without inflicting calamities on
another part," which was going very far indeed
for a slave-holding senator of that time. He
was of course totally opposed to abolition and
the Abolitionists, and showed that the only im-
mediate effect of the movement had been to
make the lot of the slaves still worse, and for the
moment to do away with any chance of intelli-
gently discussing the question of emancipation.
For, like many other Southerners, he fondly
cherished the idea of gradual peaceful emanci-
pation, — an idea which the course of events
made wholly visionary, but which, under the
circumstances, might well have been realized.
He proceeded to give most questionable praise
to the North for some acts as outraoreous and
disgraceful as were ever perpetrated by its citi-
zens, stating that —

Their conduct was above all praise, above all
thanks, above all gratitude. They had chased off the

166 THOMAS HART BENTON.

foreign emissaries, silenced the gabbling tongues of
female dupes, and dispersed the assemblages, whether
fanatical, visionary, or incendiary, of all that congre-
gated to preach against evils that affected others, not
themselves ; and to propose remedies to aggravate the
disease which they had pretended to cure. They
had acted with a noble spirit. They had exerted a
vigor beyond all law. They had obeyed the enact-
ments, not of the statute-book, but of the heart.

These fervent encomiums were fully warranted
by the acts of various Northern mobs, that had
maltreated abolitionist speakers, broken up
anti-slaver}' meetings, and committed numerous
other deeds of lawless violence. But however
flattered the Northerners of that generation
may have been, in feeling that they thoroughly
deserved Benton's eulogy, it is doubtful if their
descendants will take quite the same pride in
looking back to it. An amusing incident of the
debate was Callioun's attack upon one of the
most subservient allies the South ever had in
the Northern States ; he caused to be sent up
to the desk and read an abolition paper pub-
lished in New Hampshire, which contained a
bitter assault upon Franklin Pierce, then a
member of Congress. Nominally he took this
course to show that there was much greater
strength in the abolition movement, and there-
fore much greater danger to the South, than the

SLAVE QUESTION APPEARS IN POLITICS. 1G7

Northern senators were willing to admit ; in real-
ity he seems to have acted partly from wanton
malice, partly from overbearing contempt for
the truckling allies and apologists of slavery in
the North, and partly from a desire not to see
the discussion die out, but rather, in spite of his
continual profession to the contrary, to see it
maintained as a standing subject of irritation.
He wished to refuse to receive the petitions, on
the ground that they touched a subject that
ought not even to be discussed ; yet he must
have known well that he was acting in the very
way most fitted to give rise to discussion, — a
fact that was pointed out to him by Benton, in
a caustic speech. He also took the ground that
the question of emancipation affected the states
exclusively, and that Congress had no more ju-
risdiction over the subject in the District of
Columbia than she had in the State of North
Carolina. This precious contribution to the
true interpretation of the Constitution was so
farcically and palpably false that it is incredi-
ble that he should himself have believed what
he was saying. He was still smarting from the
nullification controversy ; he had seceded from
his party, and was sore with disappointed am-
bition ; and it seems very improbable that he
was honest in his professions of regret at see-
ing questions come up which would disturb

168 THOMAS HART BENTON.

the Union. On the contrary, much of the op-
position he was continually making to supposi-
titious federal and Northern encroachments on
the rights of the South must have been merely
factious, and it seems likely that, partly from a
feeling of revenge and partly with the hope of
gratifying his ambition, he was anxious to do
all he could to work the South up to the high-
est pitch of irritation, and keep her there until
there was a dissolution of the Union. Benton
evidently thought that this was the case ; and
in reading the constant threats of nullification
and secession which run through all Calhoun's
speeches, and the innumerable references he
makes to the alleged fact that he had come off
victorious in his treasonable struggle over the
tariff in 1833, it is difficult not to accept Ben-
ton's view of the matter. He always spoke of
Calhoun with extreme aversion, and there were
probably moments when he was inclined heartily
to sympathize with Jackson's death-bed regret
that he had not hung the South Carolina Nulli-
fier. Doubtless in private life, or as regards
any financial matters, Calhoun's conduct was
always blameless ; but it may well be that he
has received far more credit for purity of motive
in his public conduct than his actions fairly en-
title him to.

Calhoun was also greatly exercised over the

SLAVE QUESTION APPEARS IN POLITICS. 1G9

circulation of abolition documents in the South.
At his request a committee of five was ap-
pointed to draft a bill on the subject ; he was
chairman, and three of the other four members
were from the Slave States ; yet his report was
80 extreme that only one of the latter would
sign it with him. He introduced into it a long
argument to the effect that the Constitution
was a mere compact between sovereign states,
and inferentially that nullification and secession
were justifiable and constitutional ; and then
drew a vivid picture of the unspeakable horrors
with which, as he contended, the action of the
Northern Abolitionists menaced the South. The
bill subjected to penalties any postmaster who
should knowingly receive and put into the mail
any publication touching slavery, to go into
any state which had forbidden by law the cir-
culation of such a publication. In discussing
this bill he asserted that Congress, in refusing
to pass it, would be cooperating with the Aboli-
tionists ; and then he went on to threaten as
usual that in such case nullification or secession
would become necessary. Benton had become
pretty well tired of these threats, his attach-
ment to the Union even exceeding his dislike
to seeing slavery meddled with ; and he headed
the list of half a dozen Southern senators who
joined with the bulk of the Northerners in de-

/

170 THOMAS HART BENTON.

feating the bill, which was lost by a vote of
twenty-five to nineteen. A few of the North-
ern "dough-faces " voted with Calhoun. There
is a painfully striking contrast between the
courage shown by Benton, a slave-holder with
a slave-holding constituency, in opposing this
bill, and the obsequious subserviency to the ex-
treme Southern feeling shown on the same oc-
casion by Wright, Van Buren, and Buchanan
— fit representatives of the sordid and odious
political organizations of New York and Penn-
sylvania.

Several other questions came up towards the
end of Jackson's administration which were
more or less remotely affected by the feeling
about slavery. Benton succeeded in getting a
bill through to extend the boundaries of the
State of Missouri so as to take in territory lying
northwest of her previous limit, the Indian
title to which was extinguished by treaty. This
annexed land lay nortli of the boundary for
slave territory established by the Missouri Com-
promise ; but Benton experienced no difficulty
in getting his bill through. It was not, how-
ever, in the least a move designed in the inter-
ests of the slave power. Missouri's feeling was
precisely that which would actuate Oregon or
Washington Territory to-day, if either wished
to annex part of Northern Idaho.

i

J

SLAVE QUESTION APPEARS IN POLITICS. 171

The territories of Arkansas and Michigan had
applied for admission into the Union as states ;
and as one would be a free and the other a slave
state, it was deemed proper that they should
come in together. Benton himself urged the
admission of the free state of Michigan, while
the interests of Arkansas were confided to
Buchanan of Pennsylvania. The slavery ques-
tion entered but little into the matter ; although
some objections were raised on that score, as
well as on account of the irregular manner in
which the would-be states had acted in prepar-
ing for admission. The real ground of opposi-
tion to the admission of the two new states was
political, as it was known that they could both
be relied upon for Democratic majorities at
the approaching presidential election. Many
Whigs, therefore, both from the North and the
South, opposed it.

The final removal of the Cherokees from
Georgia and Alabama was brought about in
1836 by means of a treaty with those Indians.
Largely through the instrumentality of Benton,
and in spite of the opposition of Clay, Calhoun,
and Webster, this instrument was ratified in the
Senate by the close vote of thirty-one to fifteen.
Although new slave territory was thus acquired,
the vote on the treaty was factional and not
sectional, being equally divided between the

172 THOMAS HART BENTON.

Northern and the Southern States, Calhoun
and six other Southern senators opposing it,
chiefly from hostihty to the administration.
The removal of the Indians was probably a ne-
cessity ; undoubtedly it worked hardship in in-
dividual instances, but on the whole it did not
in the least retard the civilization of the tribe,
which was fully paid for its losses ; and more-
over, in its new home, continued to make prog-
ress in every way until it became involved in
the great civil war, and received a setback from
which it has not yet recovered. These Chero-
kees were almost the last Indians left in any
number east of the Mississippi, and their re-
moval solved the Indian problem so far as the
old states were concerned.

Later on Benton went to some trouble to
disprove the common statement that we have
robbed the original Indian occupants of their
lands. He showed by actual statistics that up
to 1840 we had paid to the Indians eighty-five
millions of dollars for land purchases, which
was over five times as much as the United
States gave the great Napoleon for Louisiana ;
and about three times as much as we paid
France, Spain, and Mexico together for the
purchase of Louisiana, Florida, and California ;
while the amount of land received in return
would not equal any one of these purchases,

1

SLAVE QUESTION APPEARS IN POLITICS. 173

and was but a fractional part of Lousiana or
California. We paid the Cherokees for their
territory exactly as much as we paid the French,
at the height of their power, for Louisiana ;
while as to the Creek and Choctaw nations, we
paid each more for their lands than we paid for
Louisiana and Florida combined. The dealings
of the government with the Indian have often
been unwise, and sometimes unjust; but they
are very far indeed from being so black as is
commonly represented^ especially when the tre-
mendous difficulties of the case are taken into
account.

Far more important than any of these mat-
ters was the acknowledgment of the indepen-
dence of Texas ; and in this, as well as in the
troubles with Mexico which sprang from it,
slavery again played a prominent part, although
not nearly so important at first as has com-
monly been represented. Doubtless the slave-
holders worked hard to secure additional terri-
tory out of which to form new slave states ; but
Texas and California would have been in the
end taken by us, had there not been a single
slave in the Mississippi valley. The greed for
the conquest of new lands which characterized
the Western people had nothing whatever to do
with the fact that some of them owned slaves.
Long before there had been so much as the

174 THOMAS HART BENTON.

faintest foreshadowing of the importance which
the slavery question was to assume, the West
had been eagerly pressing on to territorial con-
quest, and had been chafing and fretting at the
restraint put upon it, and at the limits set to
its strivings by the treaties established with
foreign powers. The first settlers beyond the
Alleghanies, and their immediate successors,
who moved down along the banks of the Ohio,
the Cumberland, and the Tennessee, and thence
out to the Mississippi itself, were not generally
slave-holders ; but they were all as anxious to
wrest the Mississippi valley from the control of
the French as their descendants were to overrun
the Spanish lands lying along the Rio Grande.
In other words, slavery had very little to do
with the Western aggressions on Mexican ter-
ritory, however it might influence the views of
Southern statesmen as to lending support to
the Western schemes.

The territorial boundaries of all the great
powers originally claiming the soil of the West
— France, Spain, and the United States — were
very ill-defined, there being no actual possession
of the lands in dispute, and each power making
a great showing on its own map. If the ex-
treme views of any one were admitted, its adver-
sary, for the time being, would have had noth-
ing. Thus before the treaty of 1819 with Spain

SLAVE QUESTION APPEARS IN POLITICS. 1T5

our nominal boundaries and those of the latter
power in the West overlapped each other ; and
the extreme Western men persisted in saying
that we had given up some of the territory
which belonged to us because we had consented
to adopt a middle line of division, and had not
insisted upon being allowed the full extent of
our claims. Benton always took this view of
it, insisting that we had given up our rights
by the adoption of this treaty. Many South-
erners improved on this idea, and spoke of the
desirability of " re-annexing " the territory we
had surrendered, — endeavoring by the use of
this very inappropriate word, to give a color of
right to their proceedings. As a matter of fact
it was inevitable, as well as in the highest de-
gree desirable for the good of humanity at large,
that the American people should ultimately
crowd out the Mexicans from their sparsely pop-
ulated Northern provinces. But it was quite
as desirable that this should not be done in the
interests of slavery.

American settlers had begun to press into the
outlying Spanish province of Texas before the
treaty of 1819 was ratified. Their numbers
went on increasing, and at first the Mexican
government, having achieved independence of
Spain, encouraged their incoming. But it soon
saw that their presence boded danger, and for-

176 THOMAS HART BENTON.

bade further immigration ; without effect, how-
ever, as the settlers and adventurers came
thronging in as fast as ever. The Americans
had brought their slaves with them, and when
the Mexican government issued a decree liber-
ating all slaves, they refused to be bound by it ;
and this decree was among the reasons alleged
for their revolt. It has been represented as the
chief if not the sole cause of the rebellion ; but in
reality it was not the cause at all ; it was merely
one of the occasions. Long before slavery had
been abolished in Mexico, and before it had be-
come an exciting question in the United States,
the infant colony of Texas, when but a few
months old, had made an abortive attempt at
insurrection. Any one who has ever been on
the frontier, and who knows anything whatever
of the domineering, masterful spirit and bitter
race prejudices of the white frontiersmen, will
acknowledge at once that it was out of the
question that the Texans should long continue
under Mexican rule ; and it would have been
a great misfortune if they had. It was out of
the question to expect them to submit to the
mastery of the weaker race, which they were
supplanting. Whatever might be the pretexts
alleged for revolt, the real reasons were to be
found in the deeply-marked difference of race,
and in the absolute unfitness of the Mexicans

I

' SLAVE QUESTION APPEARS IN POLITICS. 177

then to govern themselves, to say nothing of
governing others. During the dozen years that
the American colony in Texas formed part of
Mexico, the government of the latter went
through revolution after revolution, — republic,
empire, and military dictatorship following one
another in bewildering succession. A state of
things like this in the central government, espe-
cially when the latter belonged to a race alien
in blood, language, religion, and habits of life,
would warrant any community in determining
to shift for itself. Such would probably have
been the result even on people as sober and
peaceable as the Texan settlers were warlike,
reckless, and overbearing.

But the majority of those who fought for
Texan independence were not men who bad al-
ready settled in that territory, but, on the con-
trary, were adventurers from the States, who
had come to help their kinsmen and to win for
themselves, by their own prowess, homes on
what was then Mexican soil. It may as well be
frankly admitted that the conduct of the Amer-
ican frontiersmen all through this contest can
be justified on no possible plea of international
morality or law. Still, we cannot judge them
by the same standard we should apply to the
dealings between highly civilized powers of ap-
proximately the same grade of virtue and intel-

12

178 THOMAS HART BENTON.

ligence. Two nations may be contemporane-
ous so far as mere years go, and yet, for all that,
may be existing among surroundings which
practically are centuries apart. The nineteenth
century on the banks of the Thames, the Seine,
and the Rhine, or even of the Hudson and the
Potomac, was one thing ; the nineteenth century
in the valley of the Rio Grande was another and
quite a different thing.

The conquest of Texas should properly be
classed with conquests like those of the Norse
sea-rovers. The virtues and faults alike of the
Texans were those of a barbaric age. They
were restless, brave, and eager for adventure,
excitement, and plunder ; they were warlike,
resolute, and enterprising ; they had all the
marks of a young and hardy race, flushed with
the pride of strength and self-confidence. On
the other hand they showed again and again the
barbaric vices of boastfulness, ignorance, and
cruelty ; and they were utterly careless of the
rights of others, looking upon the possessions of
all weaker races as simply their natural prey.
A band of settlers entering Texas was troubled
by no greater scruples of conscience than, a
thousand j^enrs before, a ship-load of Knut's fol-
lowers might have felt at landing in England •,
and when they were engaged in warfare with
the Mexicans they could count with certainty

I

SLAVE QUESTION APPEARS IN POLITICS. 179

upon Mssistance from their kinsfolk who had
been left behind, and for the same reasons that
had enabled Rolf's Norsemen on the sea-coast of
France to rely confidently on Scandinavian help
in their quarrels with their Karling over-lords.
The great Texan hero, Houston, who drank
hard and fought hard, who was mighty in battle
and crafty in council, with his reckless, boastful
courage and his thirst for changes and risks of
all kinds, his propensity for private brawling,
and his queerly blended impulses for good and
evil, might, with very superficial alterations of
character, stand as the type of an old-world
Viking — plus the virtue of a deep and earn-
estly patriotic attachment to his whole coun-
try. Indeed his career was as picturesque and
romantic as that of Harold Hardraada himself,
and, to boot, was much more important in its
results.

Thus the Texan struggle for independence
stirred up the greatest sympathy and enthu-
siasm in the United States. The administra-
tion remained nominally neutral, but obviously
sympathized with the Texans, permitting arms
and men to be sent to their help, without hin-
drance, and indeed doing not a little discredit-
able bullying in the diplomatic dealing with
Mexico, which that unfortunate community had
her hands too full to resent. Still we did not

180 THOMAS HART BENTON.

commit a more flagrant breach of neutrality
than, for instance, England was at the same
time engaged in committing in reference to the
civil wars in Spain. The victory of San Jacinto,
in which Houston literally annihilated a Mex-
ican force twice the strength of his own, virtu-
ally decided the contest ; and the Senate at
once passed a resolution recognizing the inde-
pendence of Texas. Calhoun wished that body
to go farther, and forthwith admit Texas as a
state into the Union ; but Benton and his col-
leagues were not prepared to take such a step
at so early a date, although intending of course
that in the end she should be admitted. There
was little opposition to the recognition of Texan
independence, although a few members of the
lower house, headed by Adams, voted against it.
While a cabinet officer, and afterwards as pres-
ident, Adams had done all that he could to pro-
cure by purchase or treaty the very land which
was afterwards the cause of our troubles with
Mexico.

Much the longest and most elaborate speech
in favor of the recognition of Texan indepen-
dence was made by Benton, to whom the sub-
ject appealed very strongly. He announced
emphatically that he spoke as a Western sena-
tor, voicing the feeling of the West ; and he was
right. The opposition to the growth of our

I

SLAVE QUESTION APPEARS IN POLITICS. 181

country on its southwestern frontier was al-
most confined to the Northeast ; the West as a
whole, free states as well as slave, heartily fa-
vored the movement. The settlers of Texas
had come mainly, it is true, from the slave
states ; but there were also many who had been
born north of the Ohio. It was a matter of
comment that the guns used at San Jacinto
had come from Cincinnati — and so had some
of those who served them.

In Benton's speech he began by pointing out
the impropriety of doing what Calhoun had
done in attempting to complicate the question
of the recognition of Texan independence with
the admission of Texas as a state. He then pro-
ceeded to claim for us a good deal more credit
than we were entitled to for our efforts to
preserve neutrality ; drew a very true picture
of the commercial bonds that united us to Mex-
ico, and of the necessity that they should not be
lightly broken ; gave a spirited sketch of the
course of the war hitherto, condemning without
stint the horrible butcheries committed by the
Mexicans, but touching gingerly on the savage
revenge taken by the Americans in their turn ;
and ended by a eulogy of the Texans them-
selves, and their leaders.

It was the age of " spread-eagle " speeches,
and many of Benton's were no exception to the

182 THOMAS HART BENTON.

rule. As a people we were yet in a condition
of raw, crude immaturity ; and our very sensi-
tiveness to foreign criticism — a sensitiveness
which we now find it difficult to understand —
and the realization of our own awkwardness
made us inclined to brag about and exaggerate
our deeds. Our public speakers and writers
acquired the abominable habit of speaking of
everything and everybody in the United States
in the superlative ; and therefore, as we claimed
the highest rank for all our fourth-rate men, we
put it out of our power to do justice to the
really first-rate ones; and on account of our
continual exaggerations we were not believed
by others, and hardly even believed ourselves,
when we presented estimates that were truthful.
When every public speaker was declared to be
a Demosthenes or a Cicero, people failed to real-
ize that we actually had, in Webster, the great-
est orator of the century ; and when every gen-
eral who whipped an Indian tribe was likened
to Napoleon, we left ourselves no words with
which properly to characterize the really heroic
deeds done from time to time in the grim fron-
tier warfare. All Benton's oratory took on this
lurid coloring ; and in the present matter his
final eulogy of the Texan warriors was greatly
strained, though it would hardly have been in
his power to pay too high a tribute to some of

SLAVE QUESTION APPEARS IN POLITICS. 183

the deeds they had done. It was the heroic
age of the Southwest ; though, as with every
other heroic age, there were plenty of failings,
vices, and weaknesses visible, if the stand-point
of observation was only close enough.

u

CHAPTER IX.

THE children's TEETH ARE SET ON EDGE.

In his dealings with the Bank and his dis-
posal of the deposits Jackson ate sour grapes to
his heart's content ; and now the teeth of his
adopted child Van Buren were to be set on
edge.

Van Buren was the first product of what are
now called " machine politics " that was put
into the presidential chair. He owed his ele-
vation solely to his own dexterous political
manipulation, and to the fact that, for his own
selfish ends, and knowing perfectly well tlieir
folly, he had yet favored or connived at all
the actions into which the administration had
been led either through Jackson's ignorance and
violence, or by the crafty unscrupulousness
and limited knowledge of the Kitchen Cabinet.
The people at large would never have thought j
of him for president of their own accord ; but he I
had become Jackson's political legatee, partly j
because he had personally endeared himself to
the latter, and partly because the politicians

CHILDREN'S TEETH ARE SET ON EDGE. 185

felt tliat he was a man whom they could trust.
The Jacksouian Democracy was already com-
pletely ruled by a machine, of which the most
important cogs were the countless office-holders,
whom the spoils system had already converted
into a band of well-drilled political mercenaries.
A political machine can only be brought to a
state of high perfection in a party containing
very many ignorant and uneducated voters ;
and (the Jacksouian Democracy held in its
ranks the mass of the ignorance of the country.
Besides this such an organization requires, in
order that it may do its most effective work, to
have as its leader and figure-head a man who
really has a great hold on the people at large,
and who yet can be managed by such politi-
cians as possess the requisite adroitness ; and
Jackson fulfilled both these conditions.^ The fa-
mous Kitchen Cabinet was so called because
its members held no official positions, and yet
were known to have Jackson more under their
influence than was the case with his nominal
advisers. They stood as the first representa-
tives of a type common enough afterwards, and
of which Thurlow Weed was perhaps the best
example. They were men who held no public
position, and yet devoted their whole time to
politics, and pulled the strings in obedience to
which the apparent public leaders moved.

186 THOMAS HART BENTON.

Jackson liked Van Buren because the latter
had served him both personally and politically
— indeed Jackson was incapable of distinguish-
ing between a political and a personal service.
This liking, however, would not alone have ad-
vanced Van Buren's interests, if the latter, who
was himself a master in the New York state
machine, had not also succeeded in enlisting the
good-will and self-interest of the members of
the Kitchen Cabinet and the other intimate ad-
visers of the president. These first got Jack-
son himself thoroughly committed to Van
Buren, and then used his name and enormous
influence with the masses, coupled with their
own mastery of machine methods, to bring
about the New Yorker's nomination. In both
these moves they had been helped, and Van
Buren's chances had been immensely improved,
by an incident that had seemed at the time very
unfortunate for the latter. When he was sec-
retary of state, in carrying on negotiations with
Great Britain relative to the West India trade,
he had so far forgotten what was due to the dig-
nity of the nation as to allude disparagingly,
while thus communicating with a foreign power,
to the course pursued by the previous adminis-
tration. This extension of party lines into our
foreign diplomacy was discreditable to the
whole country. The anti-administration men

I

CHILDREN'S TEETH ARE SET ON EDGE. 187

bitterly resented it, and emphasized tlieir resent-
ment by rejecting the nomination of Van Buren
when Jackson wished to make him minister to
England. Their action was perfectly proper,
and Van Buren, by right, should have suffered
for his undignified and unpatriotic conduct.
But instead of this, and in accordance wdth the
eternal unfitness of things, what really happened
was that his rejection by the Senate actually
helped him ; for Jackson promptly made the
quarrel his own, and the masses blindly followed
their idol. Benton exultingly and truthfully
said that the president's foes had succeeded in
breaking a minister only to make a president.

Van Buren faithfully served the mammon of ]
unrighteousness, both in his own state and, later
on, at Washington ; and he had his reward,
for he was advanced to the highest offices in the
gift of the nation. He had no reason to blame
his own conduct for his final downfall ; he got
just as far along as he could possibly get ; he
succeeded because of, and not in spite of, his
moral shortcomings ; if he had always governed
his actions by a high moral standard he wouldJ
probably never have been heard of. Still, there
is some comfort in reflecting that, exactly as he
was made president for no virtue of his own,
but simply on account of being Jackson's heir,
so he was turned out of the office, not for per-

188 THOMAS HART BENTON. f

sonal failure, but because he was taken as
scapegoat, and had the sins of his political
fathers visited on his own head.

The opposition to tlie election of Van Buren
was very much disorpmized, the Whig party
not yet having solidified, — indeed it always
remained a somewhat fluid body. The election
did not have the slightest sectional significance,
slavery not entering into it, and both Northern
and Southern States voting without the least
reference to the geographical belongings of the
candidates. He was the last true Jacksonian
Democrat — Union Democrat — who became
president ; the South Carolina separatists and
manv of their fellows refused to vote for him.
The Democrats who came after him, on the
contrjiry, all hud leanings to the separatist ele-
ment which so soon obtained absolute control
of the party, to the fierce indignation of men
like Benton, Houston, and the other old Jack-
sonians, whose sincere devotion to the Union
will always entitle them to the gratitude of
every true American. As far as slavery was
concerned, however, the Southerners had hith-
erto had nothing whatever to complain of in
Van Buren's attitude. He was careful to in-
form them in his inaugural address that he
would not sanction any attempt to interfere
with the institution, whether by abolishing it in

CHILDREN'S TEETH ArE SET ON EDGE. 189

the District of Columbia or in any other way
distasteful to the South. He also expressed a
general hope that he would be able throughout
to follow in the footsteps of Jackson.

He had hardly been elected before the ruinous
financial policy to which he had been party, but
of which the effects, it must in justice be said,
were aggravated by many of the actions of the
Whigs, began to bear fruit after its kind. The
use made of the surplus was bad enough, but
the withdrawal of the United States deposits
from one responsible bank and their distribu-
tion among scores of others, many of which
were in the most rickety condition, was a step
better calculated than any other to bring about
a financial crash. It gave a stimulus to extrav-
agance, and evoked the wildest spirit of specu-
lation that the country had yet seen. The local
banks, to whom the custody of the public mon-
eys had been intrusted, used them as funds
which they and their customers could hazard
for the chance of gain ; and the gambling spirit,
always existent in the American mercantile
community, was galvanized into furious life.
The public dues were payable in the paper of
these deposit banks and of the countless others
that were even more irresponsible. The de-
posit banks thus became filled up with a motley
mass of more or less worthless bank paper,

190 THOMAS HART BENTON.

which thus formed the "surplus," of which the
distribution had caused Congress so much worry.
Their condition was desperate, as they had been
managed with the most reckless disregard for
the morrow. Many of them had hardly kept
as much specie in hand as would amount to
one fiftieth of the aggregate of their deposits
and other immediate liabilities.

The people themselves were of course prima-
rily responsible for the then existing state of
affairs ; but the government had done all in its
power to make matters worse. Panics were
certain to occur more or less often in so specu-
lative and venturesome a mercantile commu-
nity, where there was such heedless trust in the
future and such recklessness in the use of
credit. But the government, by its actions, im-
mensely increased the severity of this particu-
lar panic, and became the prime factor in pre-
cipitating its advent. Benton tried to throw
the blame mainly on the bankers and politi-
cians, who, he alleged, had formed an alliance
for the overthrow of the administration ; but
he made the plea more half-heartedly than
usual, and probably in his secret soul acknowl-
edged its puerility.

The mass of the people were still happy in
the belief that all things were working well,
and that their show of unexampled prosperity

CHILDREN'S TEETH ARE SET ON EDGE. 191

and business activity denoted a permanent and
bealtliy condition. Yet all the signs pointed
to a general collapse at no distant date ; an era
of general bank suspensions, of depreciated
currency, and of insolvency of the federal treas-
ury was at hand. No one but Benton, how-
ever, seemed able to read the signs aright, and
his foreboding utterances were laughed at or
treated with scorn by his fellow statesmen.
He recalled the memory of the times of 1818-
19, when the treasury reports of one year
showed a superfluity of revenue of which there
was no want, and those of the next showed a
deficit which required to be relieved by a loan ;
and he foretold an infinitely worse result from
the inflation of the paper system, saying : —

Are we not at this moment, and from the same
cause, realizing the first part — the elusive and
treacherous part — of this picture ? and must not the
other, the sad and real sequel, speedily follow ? The
day of revulsion in its effects may be more or less
disastrous ; but come it must. The present bloat in
the paper system cannot continue ; violent contrac-
tion must follow enormous expansion ; a scene of dis-
tress and suffering must ensue — to come of itself out
of the present state of things, without being stimulated
and helped on by our unwise legislation. ... 7 am
one of those who promised gold, not paper ; 1 did
not join in putting down the Bank of the United

192 THOMAS HART BENTON.

Staf.es to put up a wilderness of local banJcs. I did
not join in putting down the currency of a national
hank to put up a national paper currency of a thou-
sand local hanks* I did not strike Caesar to make
Antony master of Rome.

These last sentences referred to the passage
of the act repealing the specie circular and
making the notes of the banks receivable in pay-
ment of federal dues. The act was most mis-
chievous, and Benton's criticisms both of it and
of the great Whig senator who pressed it were
perfectly just ; but they apply with quite as
much weight to Jackson's dealings with the de-
posits, which Benton had defended.

Benton foresaw the coming of the panic so
clearly, and was so particularly uneasy about the
immediate effects upon the governmental treas-
ury, that he not only spoke publicly on the mat-
ter in the Senate, but even broached the subject
in the course of a private conversation with the
president-elect, to get him to try to make what
preparations he could. Van Buren, cool, skill-
ful, and far-sighted politician though he was, on
this occasion showed that he was infected with
the common delusion as to the solidity of the
country's business prosperity. He was very
friendly with Benton, and was trying to get
him to take a position in his cabinet, which the
latter refused, preferring service in the Senate;

CHILDREN'S TEETH ARE SET ON EDGE. 193

but now he listened with scant courtes}'- to the
warning, and paid no heed to it. Benton, an in-
tensely proud man, would not speak again ; and
everything went on as before. The law distrib-
uting the surplus among the states began to take
effect ; under its operations drafts for millions
of dollars were made on the banks containing
the deposits, and these banks, already sinking,
were utterly unable to honor them. It would
have been impossible, under any circumstances,
for the president to ward off the blow, but he
might at least, by a little forethought and prep-
aration, have saved the government from some
galling humiliations. Had Benton's advice been
followed, the moneys called for by the appro-
priation acts might have been drawn from the
banks, and the disbursing officers might have
been prevented from depositing in them the
sums which they drew from the treasury to
provide for their ordinary expenses ; thus the
government would have been spared the dis-
grace of being obliged to stop the actual daily
payments to the public servants ; and the na-
tion would not have seen such a spectacle as its
rulers presented when they had not a dollar
with which to pay even a day laborer, while at
the same time a law was standing on the stat-
ute-book providing for the distribution of forty
tuillions of nominal surplus.

13

194 THOMAS BART BENTON:

No effort was made to stave off even so much
of the impending disaster as was at that late
date preventable ; and a few days after Van
Buren's inauguration the country was in the
throes of the worst and most widespread finan-
cial panic it has ever seen. The distress was
fairly appalling both in its intensity and in its
universal distribution. All the banks stopped
payment, and bankruptcy was universal. Bank
paper depreciated with frightful rapidity, espe-
cially in the West ; specie increased in value so
that all the coin in the country, down to the
lowest denomination, was almost immediately
taken out of circulation, being either hoarded,
or gathered for shipment abroad as bullion.
For small change every kind of device was made
use of, — tokens, bank-bills for a few cents each,
or brass and iron counters.

Benton and others pretended to believe that
the panic was the result of a deep-laid plot on
the part of the rich classes, who controlled the
banks, to excite popular hostility against the
Jacksonian Democracy, on account of the caste
antagonism which these same richer classes were
supposed to feel towards the much -vaunted
" party of the people ; " and as Benton's mental
vision was singularly warped in regard to some
subjects, it is possible that the belief was not al-
together a pretense. It is entirely unnecessary

CHILDREN'S TEETH ARE SET ON EDGE. 195

now seriously to discuss the proposition that it
would be possible to drag the commercial classes
into so widespread and profoundly secret a con-
spiracy, with such a vague end in view, and
with the certainty that they themselves would
be, from a business stand-point, the main suf-
ferers.

The efforts made by Benton and the other
Jacksonians to stem the tide of public feeling
and direct it through the well-worn channel of
suspicious fear of, and anger at, the banks, as
the true authors of the general wretchedness,
were unavailing ; the stream swelled into a tor-
rent and ran like a mill-race in the opposite
way. The popular clamor against the admin-
istration was deafening ; and if much of it was
based on good grounds, much of it was also un-
reasonable. But a very few years before the
Jacksonians had appealed to a senseless public
dislike of the so-called "money power," in order
to help themselves to victory ; and now they
had the chagrin of seeing an only less irrational
outcry raised against themselves in turn, and
used to oust them from their places, with the
same effectiveness which had previously at-
tended their own frothy and loud-iQouthed dec-
lamations. The people were more than ready
to listen to any one who could point out, or
pretend to point out, the authors of, and the

196 THOMAS HART BENTON.

reasons for, the calamities that had befallen
them. Their condition was pitiable ; and this
was especially true in the newer and Western
states, where in many places there was abso-
lutely no money at all in circulation, even the
men of means not being able to get enough coin
or its equivalent to make the most ordinary pur-
chases. Trade was at a complete stand-still ;
laborers were thrown out of employment and left
almost starving ; farmers, merchants, mechanics,
craftsmen of every sort, — all alike were in the
direst distress. They naturally, in seeking re-
lief, turned to the government, it being almost
always the case that the existing administration
receives more credit if the country is prosperous,
and greater blame if it is not, than in either
case it is rightfully entitled to. The Democracy
was now held to strict reckoning, not only for
some of its numerous real sins but also for a
good many imaginary ones ; and the change in
the political aspect of many of the common-
wealths was astounding. Jackson's own home
State of Tennessee became strongly Whig ; and
Van Buren had the mortification of seeing New
York follow suit ; two stinging blows to the
president and the ex-president. The distress
was a godsend to the Whig politicians. They
fairly raved in their anger against the adminis-
tration, and denounced all its acts, good and

CHILDREN'S TEETH ARE SET ON EDGE. 197

bad alike, with fluent and incoherent impar-
tiality. Indeed, in their speeclies, and in the
])etitions wliich thev circulated and then sent to
the president, they used language that was to
the last degree absurd in its violence and ex-
aggeration, and drew descriptions of the iniqui-
ties of the rulers of the country which were so
overwrought as to be merely ridiculous. The
speeches about the panic, and in reference to
the proposed laws to alleviate it, were remark-
able for their inflation, even in that age of windy
oratory.

Van Buren, Benton, and their associates stood
bravely up against tlie storm of indignation
which swept over the whole country, and lost
neither head nor nerve. They needed both to
extricate themselves with any credit from the
position in which they were placed. In defer-
ence to the urgent wish of almos?all the people
an extra session of Congress was called especially
to deal with the panic. Van Buren 's message to
this body was a really statesmanlike document,
going exhaustively into the subject of the na-
tional finances. The Democrats still held the
majority in both houses, but there was so large
a floating vote, and the margins were so nar-
row, as to make the administration feel that its
hold was precarious.

The first thing to be done was to provide for

198 THOMAS HART BENTON.

the immediate wants of the government, which
had not enough money to pay even its most
necessary running expenses. To make this
temporary provision two plans were proposed.
The fourth instalment of the surplus — ten
millions — was due to the states. As there was
really no surplus, but a deficit instead, it was
proposed to repeal the deposit law so far as it
affected their fourth payment ; and treasury
notes were to be issued to provide for immedi-
ate and pressing needs.

The Whigs frantically attacked the presi-
dent's proposals, and held him and his party
accountable for all the evils of the panic ; and
in truth it was right enough to hold them so ac
countable for part ; but, after all, the harm was
largely due to causes existing throughout the
civilized world, and especially to the specula-
tive folly rife among the whole American peo-
ple. But it is always an easy and a comfort-
able thing to hold others responsible for what
is primarily our own fault.

Benton did not believe, as a matter of prin-
ciple, in the issue of treasury notes, but sup-
ported the bill for that purpose on account of
the sore straits the administration was in, and
\ts dire need of assistance from any source. He
treated it as a disagreeable but temporary
makeshift, only allowable on the ground of the

CHILDREN'S TEETH ARE SET ON EDGE. 193

sternest and most grinding necessity. He stated
that he supported the issue only because the

I treasury notes were made out in such a form
that they could not become currency ; they
were merely loan notes. Their chief character-
istic was that they bore interest ; they were
transferable only by indorsement ; were paya-
ble at a fixed time ; were not reissuable, nor of

I small denominations ; and were to be canceled
when paid. Such being the case he favored
their issue, but expressly stated that he only
did so on account of the urgency of the govern-
mental wants; and that he disapproved of any
such issue until the ordinary resources of taxes
and loans had been tried to the utmost and
failed. '' I distrust, dislike, and would fain es-
chew this treasury-note resource ; I prefer the
direct loans of 1820-21. I could only bring
myself to support this present measure when it
was urged that there was not time to carry a
loan through in its forms ; nor even then would
I consent to it until every feature of a currency
character had been eradicated from the bill."

A sharp struggle took place over the bill
brought in by the friends of the administration
and advocated by Benton, to repeal the obliga-
tion to deposit the fourth instalment of the sur-
plus with the states. This scheme of a distribu-
tion, thinly disguised under the name of deposit

200 THOMAS HART BENTON.

to soothe the feelings of Calhoun and the other
strict constructionist pundits, had worked noth-
ing but mischief from the start ; and now that
there was no surplus to distribute, it would seem
incredible that there should have been opposi-
tion to its partial repeal. Yet Webster, Clay,
and their followers strenuously opposed even
such repeal. It is possible that their motives
were honest, but much more probable that they
were actuated by partisan hostility to the ad-
ministration, or that they believed they would
increase their own popularity by favoring a plan
that seemingly distributed money as a gift
among the states. The bill was finally amended
so as to make it imperative to pay this fourth
instalment in a couple of years ; yet it was not
then paid, since on the date appointed the na-
tional treasury was bankrupt and the states could
therefore never get the money, — which was the
only satisfactory incident in the whole proceed-
ing. The financial theories of Jackson and
Benton were crude and vicious, it is true, but
Webster, Clay, and most other public men of
the day seem to have held ideas on the subject
that were almost, if not quite, as mischievous.

The great financial measures advocated by the
administration of Van Buren, and championed
with especial zeal by Benton, were those pro-
viding for an independent treasury and for

CHILDREN'S TEETH ARE SET ON EDGE. 201

hard-money payments ; that is, providing that
the government should receive nothing but gold
and silver for its revenues, and that this gold
and silver should be kept by its own officers in
real, not constructive, treasuries, — in stronir
buildings, with special officers to hold the keys„
The treasury was to be at Washington, with
branches or sub-treasuries at the principal points
of collection and disbursement.

These measures, if successful, meant that
there would be a total separation of the federal
government from all banks ; in the political
language of the times they became known as
those for the divorce of bank and state. Hith-
erto the local banks chosen by Jackson to re-
ceive the deposits had been actively hostile to
Biddlo's great bank and to its friends ; but self-
interest now united them all in violent opposi-
tion to the new scheme. Webster, Clay, and the
Whigs generally fought it bitterly in the Sen-
ate ; but Calhoun now left his recent allies and
joined with Benton in securing its passage.
However, it was for the time being defeated in
the House of Representatives. Most of the op-
position to it was characterized by sheer loud-
mouthed demagogy — cries that the govern-
ment was too aristocratic to accept the money
that was thought good enough for the people,
and similar claptrap. Benton made a very

202 THOMAS BART BENTON.

earnest plea for hard money, and especially de-
nounced the doctrme that it was the govern-
ment's duty to interfere in any way in private
business ; for, as usual in times of general dis-
tress, a good many people had a vague idea that
in some way the government ought to step in
and relieve them from the consequences of their
own folly.

Meanwhile the banks had been endeavoring
to resume specie payment. Those of New York
had taken steps in that direction but little more
than three months after the suspension. Their
weaker Western neighbors, however, were not
yet in condition to follow suit ; and the great
bank at Philadelphia also at first refused to
come in with them. But the New York banks
persisted in their purpose, resumed payment a
year after they had suspended, and eventually
the others had to fall into line ; the reluctance
to do so being of course attributed by Benton
to " tlie factious and wicked mncliinations " of
a " powerful combined political and moneyed
confederation " — a shadowy and spectral crea-
tion of vivid Jacksonian imaginations, in the
existence of which he persisted in believing.

Clay, always active as the friend of the banks,
introduced a resolution, nominally to quicken
the approach of resumption, but really to help
out precisely those weak banks which did not

I

CHILDREN'S TEETH ARE SET ON EDGE. 203

deserve help, making the notes of the resuming
banks receivable in payment of all dues to the
federal government. This was offered after
the banks of New York had resumed, and when
all the other solvent banks were on the point
of resuming also; so its nominal purpose wa&'
already accomplished, as Benton, in a caustic
speech, pointed out. He then tore the resolu-
tion to shreds, showing that it would be of espe-
cial benefit to the insolvent and unsound banks,
and would insure a repetition of the worst evils
under which the country was already suffering.
He made it clear that the proposition practically
was to force the government to receive paper
promises to pay from banks that were certain
to fail, and therefore to force the government
in turn to pay out this worthless paper to its
honest creditors. Benton's speech was an ex-
cellent one, and Clay's resolution was defeated.
All through this bank controversy, and the
other controversies relating to it, Benton took
the leading part, as mouthpiece of the admin-
istration. He heartily supported the sugges-
tion of the president, that a stringent bankrupt
law against the banks should be passed. Web-
ster stood out as the principal opponent of this
measure, basing his objections mainly upon con-
stitutional grounds ; that is, questioning the
right, rather than the expediency, of the pro-

204 THOMAS HART BENTON.

posed remedy. Benton answered liim at length
in a speech showing an immense amount of care-
ful and painstaking study and a wide range of
historical reading and legal knowledge ; he re-
plied point by point, and more than held his
own with his great antagonist. His speech was
an exhaustive study of the history and scope
of bankruptcy laws against corporations. Ben-
ton's caj)acity for work was at all times im-
mense ; he delighted in it for its own sake, and
took a most justifiable pride in his wide reading,
and especially in his full acquaintance with his-
tory, both ancient and modern. He was very
fond of illustrating his speeches on American
affairs with continual allusions and references
to events in foreign countries or in old times,
which he considered to be more or less parallel
to those he was discussing ; and indeed he often
dragged in these comparisons when there was
no particular need for such a display of his'
knowledge. He could fairly be called a learned
man, for he had studied very many subjects
deeply and thoroughly ; and though he was too
self-conscious and pompous in his utterances
not to incur more than the suspicion of pedan-
try, yet the fact remains that hardly any other
man has ever sat in the Sen;ite whose range of
information was as wide as his.

He made another powerful and carefully

CHILDREN'S TEETH ARE SET ON EDGE. 205

wrought speech in favor of what he called the
act to provide for the divorce of bank and
state. This bill, as finally drawn, consisted of
two distinct parts, one portion making provision
for the keeping of the public moneys in an inde-
pendent treasury, and the other for the hard-
money currency, which was all that the govern^
ment was to accept in payment of revenue dueso
This last provision, however, was struck out, and
the bill thereby lost the support of Calhoun,
who, with Webster, Clay, and the other Whigs,
voted against it ; but, mainly through Benton's
efforts, it passed the Senate, although by a very
slender majority. Benton, in his speech, dwelt
with especial admiration on the working of the
monetary system of France, and held it up as
well worthy to be copied by us. Most of the
points he made were certainly good ones, al-
though he overestimated the beneficent results
that would spring from the adoption of the pro-
posed system, believing that it would put an
end for the future to all panics and commercial
convulsions. In reality it would have removed
only one of the many causes which go to pro-
duce the latter, leaving the others free to work
as before ; the people at large, not the govern-
ment, were mainly to blame, and even with
them it was in some respects their misfortune
as much as their fault. Benton's error, how-

206 THOMAS HART BENTON.

ever, was natural ; like most other men he was
unable fully to realize that hardly any phenom-
enon, even the most simple, can be said to spring
from one cause only, and not from a complex
and interwoven tissue of causation — and a
panic is one of the least simple and most com-
plex of mercantile phenomena. Benton's deep-
rooted distrust of and hostility to such banking
as then existed in the United States certainly
had good grounds for existence.

This distrust was shown again when the bill
for the re-charter of the district banks came up.
The specie basis of many of them had been al-
lowed to become altogether too low ; and Ben-
ton showed himself more keenly alive than any
other public man to the danger of such a state
of things, and argued strongly that a basis of
specie amounting to one third the total of lia-
bilities was the only safe proportion, and should
be enforced by law. He made a most forcible
argument, using numerous and apt illustrations
to show the need of his amendment.

Nor was the tireless Missouri senator satisfied
even yet ; for he introduced a resolution asking
leave to bring in a bill to tax the circulation of
banks and bankers, and of all corporations, com-
panies, or individuals, issuing paper currency.
One object of the bill was to raise revenue,
but even more he aimed at the regulation of the

I

CHILDREN'S TEETH ARE SET ON EDGE. 207

currency by the suppression of small notes ; and
for this end the tax was proposed to be made
heaviest on notes under twenty dollars, and to be
annually augmented until it had accomplished
its object and they had been driven out of cir-
culation. In advocating his measure he used,
as was perhaps unavoidable, some arguments
that savored strongly of demagogy ; but on the
whole he made a strong appeal, using as prece-.
dents for the law he wished to see enacted both
the then existing banking laws in England and
those that had obtained previously in the his'
tory of the United States.

Taken altogether, while the Jacksonians,
during the period of Van Buren's presidency,
rightly suffered for their previous financial mis-
deeds, yet so far as their actions at the time were
concerned, they showed to greater advantage
than the Whigs. Nor did they waver in their
purpose even when the tide of popular feeling
changed. The great financial measure of the
administration, in which Benton was most in-
terested, the independent treasury bill, he suc-
ceeded in getting through the Senate twice ; the
first time it was lost in the House of Represen-
tatives ; but on the second occasion, towards
the close of Van Buren's term, firmness and per-
severance met their reward. The bill passed
the Senate by an increased majority, scraped

208 THOMAS HART BENTON.

through the House after a bitter contest, and
became a law. It developed the system known
as that of the Sub-Treasury, which has proved
satisfactory to the present day.

It was during Van Buren's term that Biddle's
great bank, so long the pivot on which turned
the fortunes of political parties, finally tottered
to its fall. It was ruined by unwise and reck-
less management; and Benton sang a paean over
its downfall, exulting in its fate as a justification
of all that he had said and done. Yet there can
be little doubt that its mismanagement became
gross only after all connection with the national
government had ceased ; and its end, attributa-
ble to causes not originally existent or likely to
6xist, can hardly be rightly considered in pass-
ing judgment upon the actions of the Jackso-
nians in reference to it.

CHAPTER X.

LAST DAYS OF THE JACKSONIAN DEMOCRACY.

The difficulty and duration of a war with an
Indian tribe depend less upon the numbers of
the tribe itself than upon the nature of the
ground it inhabits. The two Indian tribes that
have caused the most irritating and prolonged
struggle are the Apaches, who live in the vast,
waterless, mountainous deserts of Arizona and
New Mexico, and whom we are at this present
moment engaged in subduing, and the Semi-
noles, who, from among the impenetrable
swamps of Florida, bade the whole United
States army defiance for seven long years ; and
this although neither Seminoles nor Apaches
ever brought much force into the field, nor in-
flicted such defeats upon us as have other Indian
tribes, like the Creeks and Sioux.

The conflict with the Seminoles was one of
the legacies left by Jackson to Van Buren ; it
lasted as long as the Revolutionary War, cost
thirty millions of dollars, and baffled the efforts
of several generals and numerous troops, who

14

210 THOMAS HART BENTON.

had previously shown themselves equal to any
in the world. The expense, length, and ill-suc-
cess of the struggle, and a strong feeling that
the Seminoles had been wronged, made it a
great handle for attack on the administration ;
and the defense was taken up by Benton, who
always accepted completely the Western esti-
mate of any form of the Indian question.

As is usually the case in Indian wars there
had been much wrong done by each side ; but
in this instance we were the more to blame, al-
though the Indians themselves were far from
being merely harmless and suffering innocents.
The Seminoles were being deprived of their
lands in pursuance of the general policy of re-
moving all the Indians west of the Mississippi.
They had agreed to go, under pressure, and in-
fluenced, probably, by fraudulent representa-
tions ; but they declined to fulfill their agree-
ment. If they had been treated wisely and
firmly they might probably have been allowed
to remain without serious injury to the sur-
rounding whites. But no such treatment was
attempted, and as a result we were plunged in
one of the most harassing Indian wars we ever
waged. In their gloomy, tangled swamps, and
among the unknown and untrodden recesses of
the everglades the Indians found a secure asy-
lum ; and they issued from their haunts to burn

I

LAST DAYS OF JACKSONIAN DEMOCRACY. 211

and ravage almost all the settled part of Florida,
fairly depopulating five counties ; while the sol-
diers could rarely overtake them, and when they
did, were placed at such a disadvantage that the
Indians repulsed or cut off detachment after
detachment, generally making a merciless and
complete slaughter of each. The great Semi-
nole leader, Osceola, was captured only by de-
liberate treachery and breach of faith on our
part, and the Indians were worn out rather than
conquered. This was partly owing to their re-
markable capacities as bush-fighters, but infi-
nitely more to the nature of their territory.

Our troops generally fought with great
bravery; but there is very little else in the
struggle, either as regards its origin or the
manner in which it was carried on, to which an
American can look back with any satisfaction.
We usually group all our Indian wars together,
in speaking of their justice or injustice ; and
thereby show flagrant ignorance. The Sioux
and Cheyennes, for instance, have more often
been sinning than sinned against ; for example,
the so-called Chivington or Sandy Creek Mas-
sacre, in spite of certain most objectionable de-
tails, was on the whole as righteous and benefi-
cial a deed as ever took place on the -frontier.
On the other hand, the most cruel wrongs
have been perpetrated by whites upon perfectly

212 THOMAS BART BENTON.

peaceable and unoffending tribes like those of
California, or the Nez Per^es. Yet the emascu-
lated professional humanitarians mourn as much
over one set of Indians as over the other — and
indeed, on all points connected with Indian
management, are as untrustworthy and unsafe
leaders as would be an equal number of the
most brutal white borderers. But the Semi-
nole War was one of those where the Eastern,
or humanitarian view was more nearly correct
than was any other ; although even here the
case was far from being entirely one-sided.

Benton made an elaborate but not always
candid defense of the administration, both as to
the origin and as to the prosecution of the war.
He attempted to show that the Seminoles had
agreed to go West, had broken their treaty
without any reason, had perpetrated causeless
massacres, had followed up their successes with
merciless butcheries, which last statement was
true ; and that Osceola had forfeited all claim
or right to have a flag of truce protect him.
There was a certain justice in his position even
on these questions, and when he came to defend
the conduct of our soldiers he had the right en-
tirely with him. They were led by the same
commander, and belonged to the same regi-
nxents, that in Canada had shown themselves
equal to the famous British infantry ; they had

LAST BAYS OF JACKSONIAN DEMOCRACY. 213

to contend with tlie country, rather than with
their enemies, as the sweltering heat, the stag-
nant lagoons, the quaking morasses, and the
dense forests of Florida made it almost impos-
sible for an army to carry on a successful cam-
paign. Moreover, the Seminoles were well
armed ; and many tribes of North American
Indians show themselves, when with good weap-
ons and on their own ground, more dangerous
antagonists than would be an equal number of
the best European troops. Indeed, under such
conditions they can only be contended with on
equal terms if the opposing white force is made
up of frontiersmen who are as good woodsmen
and riflemen as themselves, and who, moreover,
have been drilled by some man like Jackson,
who knows how to handle them to the best ad-
vantage, both in disciplining their lawless cour-
age and in forcing them to act under orders
and together, — the lack of which discipline and
power of supporting each other has often ren-
dered an assemblage of formidable individual
border - fighters a mere disorderly mob when
brought into the field.

The war dragged on tediously. The troops —
regulars, volunteers, and militia alike — fought
the Indians again and again ; there were pitched
battles, surprises, ambuscades, and assaults on
places of unknown strength; hundreds of sol-

214 THOMAS HART BENTON.

diers were slain in battle or by treachery,
hundreds of settlers were slaughtered in their
homes, or as they fled from them ; the bloody
Indian forays reached even to the outskirts of
Tallahatchce and to within sight of the walls of
quaint old St. Augustine. Little by little, how-
ever, the power of the Seminoles was broken ;
their war bands were scattered and driven from
the field, hundreds of their number were slain
in fight, and five times as many surrendered
and were taken west of the Mississippi. The
white troo]is marched tlirough Florida down to
and into the everglades, and crossed it back-
wards and forwards, from the (lulf of jNIexico
to the Atlantic Ocean ; tliey hunted their foes
from morass to morass and from luimmock to
hummock ; they mapped out the whole hitherto
unknown country; they established numerous
posts; opened hundreds of miles of wngon road;
and built very many causeways and bridges.
But they could not end the war. The bands of
Indians broke up and entirely ceased to offer
resistance to bodies of armed whites ; but as
individuals they continued as dangerous to the
settlers as ever, prowling out at night like wild
beasts from their fastnesses in the dark and
fetid swamps, murdering, burning, and ravag-
ing in all the outlying settlements, and destroy,
ing every lonely farm-house or homestead.

LAST DAYS OF JACKSON I AN DEMOCRACY. 215

There was but one way in which the war
could be finally ended, and that was to have
the territory occupied by armed settlers ; in
other words, to have it won and held exactly
as almost all the land of the United States has
been in the beginning. Benton introduced a
bill to bring this about, giving to every such
settler a good inheritance in the soil as a reward
for his enterprise, toil, and danger ; und the
war was finished only by the adoption of this
method. He supported his bill in a very effec-
tive speech, showing that the proposed way was j
the only one by which a permanent conquest
could be effected ; he himself had, when young, i
seen it put into execution in Tennessee and
Kentucky, where the armed settlers, with their
homesteads in the soil, formed the vanguard of
the white advance : where the rifle - bearing
backwoodsmen went forth to fight and to culti-
vate, living in assemblages of block-houses at
first and separating into individual settlements
afterwards. The work had to be done with axe,
spade, and rifle alike. Benton rightly insisted
that there was no longer need of a large army
in Florida : —

Why, the men who are there now can find nobody
to fight ! It is two years since a fight has been had.
Ten men who will avoid surprises and ambuscades can
now go from one end of Florida to the other. As

216 THOMAS HART BENTON.

warriors, these Indians no longer appear ; it is only
as assassins, as robbers, as incendiaries, that they lurk
about. What is now wanted is not an army to figl)t,
but settlers and cultivators to take possession and
keep possession ; and the armed cultivator is the man
for that. The block-house is the first house to be
built in an Indian country ; the stockade the first
fence to be put up. Within that block -house, or
witliin a hollow square of block-houses, two miles
long on each side, two hundred yards apart, and in-
closing a good field, safe habitations are to be found
for families. Cultivation and defense then go hand iu
hand. The heart of the Indian sickens when he hears
the crowing of the cock, the barkinjr of the doii, tlie
sound of the axe, and the crack of the rifle. These
are the true evidences of the dominion of the white
man ; these are the proofs that the owner has come
and means to stay, and then the Indians feel it to be
time for them to go. While soldiers alone are in
the country they feel their j)resence to be temporary ;
that they are mere sojourners in the land, and sooner
or later must go away. It is the settler alone, the
armed settler, whose presence announces the domin-
ion, the permanent dominion, of the white man.

Benton's ideas were right, and were acted
upon. It is impossible even to subdue an
Indian tribe by the army alone ; the latter can
only pave the way for and partially protect
the armed settlers who are to liold tiie soil.

Benton continued to take a great interest in

LAST DAYS OF JACKSONIAN DEMOCRACY. 217

the disposal of the public lands, as was natural
ill a senator from the West, where the bulk of
these lands lay. He was always a great advo-
cate of a homestead law. During Van Buren's
administration, he succeeded in getting two or
three bills on the subject through the Senate.
One of these allowed lands that had been five
years in the market to be reduced in price to a
dollar an acre, and if they stood five years longer
to go down to seventy-five cents. The bill was
greatly to the interest of the Western farmer in
the newer, although not necessarily the newest,
parts of the country. The man who went on •
the newest land was in turn provided for by the
preemption bill, which secured the privilege of
first purchase to the actual settler on any lands
to which the Indian title had been extinguished ;
to be paid for at the minimum price of public
lands at the time. An effort was made to con-
fine the benefits of this proposed law to citi-
zens of the United States, excluding unnatu-
ralized foreigners from its action. Benton, as,
representing the new states, who desired immi-
grants of every kind, whether foreign or native,
successfully opposed this. He pointed out that
there was no question of conferring political
rights, which involved the management of the
government, and which should not be conferred
until the foreigner had become a naturalized

218

THOMAS HART BENTON.

'i

citizen ; it was merely a question of allowing the
alien a right to maintain himself and to snpport
his family. He especially opposed the amend-
ment on account of the class of foreigners it
would affect. Aliens who wished to take up
public lands were not paupers or criminals, and
did not belong to the shiftless and squalid for-
eign mob that driftetl into the great cities of the
seaboard and the interior ; but on the contrary
were among our most enterprising, hardy, and
thrifty citizens, who had struck out for them-
selves into the remote parts of the new states
and had there begun to bring the wilderness
into subjection. Such men deserved to be en-
couragetl in every way, and should receive from
the preemption laws the same benefits that
would enure to native-born citizens. The third
bill introduced, which passed the Senate but
failed in the House, was one to permit the pub-
lic lands sold to be immediately taxed by the
states in which they lay. Originally these lands
had been sold upon credit, the total amount not
being paid, nor the title passed, until five years
after the sale ; and during this time it would
hnve been unjust to tax them, as failure in pay-
ing the installments to the government would
have let the lands revert to the latter ; but
when the cash system was substituted for credit
Benton believed that there was no longer reason

LAST DAYS OF JACKSONIAN DEMOCRACY. 219

y

wliv the new lands should not bear their share
of the state burdens.

During Van Buren's administration the stand- "%
ard of public honesty, which had been lowering
with frightful rapidity ever since, with Adams,
the men of high moral tone had gone out of
power, went almost as far down as it could go ;
although things certainly did not change for the
better under Tyler and Polk. Not only was
there the most impudent and unblushing rascal-
ity among the public servants of the nation, but
the people themselves, through their representa-
tives in the state legislatures, went to work to
swindle their honest creditors. Many states,
in the rage for public improvements, had con-
tracted debts which they now refused to pay ;
in many cases they were unable, or at least so
professed themselves, even to pay the annual
interest. The debts of the states were largely
held abroad ; they had been converted into
stock and held in shares, which had gone into
a great number of hands, and now, of course,
became greatly depreciated in value. It is a
painful and shameful page in our history ; and
every man connected with the repudiation of
the states' debts ought, if remembered at all, to
be remembered only with scorn and contempt.
However, time has gradually shrouded from our
sight both the names of the leaders in the re-

^

«i

220 THOMAS HART BENTON.

piuliation and the names of the victims wliom
they swindled. Two alone, one in each class,
will always be kept in mind. ■. Before Jefferson
/Davis took his place among the arch-traitors in
' our annals he had already long been known as
one of the chief repudiators ; it was not unnat-
ural that to dishonesty towards the creditors of
the })ul)lic he should afterwards add treachery
J:o\vards the ])ul)lic itself. I'he one most pro-
minent victim was described by Benton himself:
"The Reverend Sydney Smith, of witty memory,
but amiable withal, was accustomed to lose all
his amiability, but no part of his wit, when he
spoke of his Pennsylvania bonds — which, in
fact, was very often."

Many of the bond-holders, however, did not
manifest their grief by caustic wit, but looked
to more substantial relief ; and did their best to
bring about the assumption of the state debts,
in some form, whether open or disguised, by the
federal government. The British capitalists
united with many American capitalists to work
for some such action ; and there were plenty of
people in the states willing enough to see it
done. Of course it would have been criminal
folly on the part of the federal government to
take any such step ; and B<Miton determined to
meet and check the effort at the very beginning.
The London Bankers' Circular had contained

LAST BAYS OF JACKSONIAN DEMOCRACY. 221

a proposition recommending that the Congress
of the United States should guarantee, or other-
wise provide for, the ultimate payment of the
debts which the states had contracted for state
or local purposes. Benton introduced a series
of resolutions declaring utter opposition to the
proposal, both on the ground of expediency and
on that of constitutionality. The resolutions
were perfectly proper in their purpose, but were
disfigured by that cheap species of demagogy
which consists in denouncing purely suppositi-
tious foreign interference, complicated by an
allusion to Benton's especial pet terror, the in-
evitable money power. As he put it: "Foreign
interference and influence are far more danger-
ous in the invidious intervention of the mon-
eyed power than in the forcible invasions of
fleets and armies."

An attempt was made directly to reverse the
effect of the resolutions by amending them so as
to provide that the public land revenue should
be divided among the states, to help them in
the payment of these debts. Both Webster and
Clay supported this amendment, but it was for-
tunately beaten by a large vote.

Benton's speech, like the resolutions in sup-
port of which he spoke, was right in its purpose,
but contained much matter that was beside the
mark. He had worked himself into such a con-

222 THOMAS HART BENTON.

dition over the supposititious intrigues of the
*' money power " — an attack on which is al-
most always sure to be popular — that he was
very certain to discover evidence of their exist-
ence on all, even the most unlikely, occasions;
and it is difficult to think that ht^ was not him-
self aware how overdrawn was his propliecy of
the probable interference of fori'ign powers in
our affairs, if the resolutions he had presented
were not adopted.

The tariff had once more begun to give
trouble, and the South was again complaining
of its workinjis, aware that she was fallini' al-
ways more to the rear in the race for prosperity,
and blindly attributing her failure to everything
but the true reason, — the existence of slavery.
Even Benton himself showed a curionsly pa-
thetic eagerness to prove both to others and liim-
self that tlie cause of the increasing disparity in
growtli, and incompatibility in interest between
the two sections, must be due to some tem])o-
rary and artificial cause, and endeavored to hide
from all eyes, even from his own, the fact that
the existence of slavery was working, slowly
but surely, and with steadily increasing rapid-
ity, to rend in sunder the Union which he loved
and served with such heartfelt devotion. He
tried to prove that the main cause of discontent
was to be found in the tariff and other laws,

i

LAST DAYS OF JACKSONIAN DEMOCRACY. 223

which favored the North at the expense of the
South. At the same time he entered an elo-
quent plea for a warmer feeling between the
sections, and pointed out the absolute hopeless-
ness of attempting to better the situation in
any way by disunion. The great Missourian
could look back with fond pride and regret to
the condition of the South as it was during and
immediately after the colonial days, when it
was the seat of wealth, power, high living, and
free-handed hospitality, and was filled to over-
flowing with the abounding life of its eager and
turbulent sons. The change for the worse in
its relative condition was real and great. He
reproved his fellow-Southerners for attributing
this change to a single cause, the unequal work-
ing of the federal government, " which gave all
the benefits of the Union to the South and all
its burdens to the North ; " he claimed that it
was due to many other causes as well. Yet
those whom he rebuked were as near right as
he was ; for the change ^vas due in the main to
only one cause — but that cause was slavery.
It is almost pitiful to see the strong, stern, self-
reliant statesman refusing, with nervous and
passionate willfulness, to look the danger in
the face, and, instead thereof, trying to per-
suade himself into the belief that ** the remedy
lies in the right working of the Constitution ;

224 THOMAS HART BENTON.

I

in the cessation of unequal legislation ; in the
reduction of the inordinate expenses of the gov-
ernment ; in its return to the simple, limited,
and economical machine it was intended to be;
aud in the revival of fraternal feelini's and re-
spect for each other's riglits and just com-
plaints." Like many anotlu^r man he thought, f
or tried to think, that by sweeping the dust
from the door-sill he coulil somehow stave off
the whirling rush of the sand-storm.

The compromise taritT of 1833 had abolislied
all s})e('iric duties, establishing <7(7 valorem ones
in their j)lace ; and the result had been great
uncertaintv and iniustice in its workini^. Now
whether a protective tariff is right or wrong
may be open to question ; but if it exists at
all, it should work as simply and with as much
certainty and exactitude as possible ; if its in-
terpretation varies, or if it is continually med-
dled with by Congress, great damage ensues.
It is in reality of far less importance that a law
should be ideally right than that it should be
certain and steady in its workings. Even sup-
posing that a high tariff is all wrong, it would
work infinitely better for the country than would
a series of chantres between hi<;h and low duties.
Benton strongly advocated a retuin to spc^cific
duties, as being simpler, surer, and better on
every account. In commenting on the ad vor

LAST DAYS OF JACKSONIAN DEMOCRACY. 225

lor em duties, he showed how thev had been
adopted blindly and without discussion by the
frightened, silent multitude of congressmen and
senators, who jumped at Clay's compromise bill
in 1833 as giving them a loop-hole of escape
from a situation where they would have had to
face evil consequences, no matter what stand
they took. Benton's comment on men of this
stamp deserves chronicling, from its justice and
biting severity : " It (the compromise act) was
passed by the aid of the votes of those — always
a considerable per centum in every public body
— to whom the name of compromise is an irre-
sistible attraction ; amiable men, who would do
no wrong of themselves, and without whom the
designing could also do but little wrong."

He not only devoted himself to the general
subject of the tariff in relation to specific duties,
but he also took up several prominent abuses.
One subject, on which he was never tired of
harping with monotonous persistency, was the
duty on salt. The idea of making salt free had
become one which he was almost as fond of
bringing into every discussion, no matter how
inappropiate to the matter in hand, as he was
of making irrelevant and abusive allusions to
his much - enduring and long-suffering hobby,
the iniquitous "money power." Benton had all
the tenacity of a snapping turtle, and was as

15

k..

226 THOMAS HART DENTON.

firm a believer In tlie policy of '' continuous
hiimmering " as Grant himself. His tenacity and
his pertinacious refusal to abandon any contest,
no matter wliat the odds were against him, and
no matter how often he had to return to the
charge, formed two of his most invaluable qual-
ities, and when calh^d into play on behalf of
such an object as the preservation of the Union,
cannot receive too high piaise at our hands ; for
they did the country services so great and last-
ing that they should never be forgotten. It
would have been fortunate indeed if Clay and
Webster had j)ossesscd the fearless, aggressive
courage and iron will of the i uggcd Missourian,
who was so often pitted against them in the
]>oliti(al arena. But wlien Benton's attention
was firndy fixed on the accom})lishment of some-
thing c< nipaiatively trivial, his dogged, stub-
born, and unyielding earnestness drew him into
making eilorts of which the dispiopoition to
the result aimed at was rather dr(»ll. Kothing
could thwart him or turn liim aside ; and though
slow to take u]) an idea, yet, if it was once in
his head, to drive it out was a simply hopeless
task. These qualities were of such invaluable
use to the state on so many great occasions that
we can well aflord to treat them merely with a
good-humored laugh, whtn we see them exer-
cised on behalf of such a ])iece of foolishness
as, for example, the expunging resolution.

LAST DAYS OF JACKSONIAN DEMOCRACY 227

The repeal of the salt tax, then, was a partic-
ular favorite in Benton's rather numerous stable
of hobbies, because it gave free scope for the
use of sentimental as well as of economic argu-
ments. He had the right of the question, and
was not in the least daunted by his numerous
rebuffs and the unvarying ill success of his ef-
forts. Speaking in 1840, he stated that he had
been urging the repeal for twelve years; and
for the purpose of furnishing data with which
to compare such a period of time, and without
the least suspicion that there was anything out
of the way in the comparison, he added, in a
solemn parenthesis, that this was two years
longer than the siege of Troy lasted. In the
same speech was a still choicer morsel of elo-
quence about salt : " The Supreme Ruler of the
Universe has done everything to supply his
creatures with it ; man, the fleeting shadow of
an instant, invested with his little brief author-
ity, has done much to deprive them of it."
After which he went on to show a really ex-
tensive acquaintance with the history of salt
taxes and monopolies, and with the uses and
physical structure and surroundings of the min-
eral itself — all which might have taught his
hearers that a man may combine much erudi-
tion with a total lack of the sense of humor.
The salt tax is dragged, neck and heels, into

.^28 THOMAS HART BENTON.

many of Benton's speeches much as Cooper
manages, on all possible occasions, throughout
his novels, to show the unlikeness of the Bay
of Naples to the Bay of New York — not the
only point of resemblance, by the way, between
the characters of the Missouri statesman and
the New York novelist. Whether the subject
under discussion was the taxation of bank-notes,
or the abolition of slavery, made very little dif-
ference to Benton as to introducing an allusion
to the salt monopoly. One of his happy argu-
ments in favor of the repeal, which was ad-
dressed to an exceedingly practical and com-
monplace Congress, was that the early Chris-
tian disciples had been known as the salt of
the earth — a biblical metaphor, which Benton
kindly assured his hearers was very expressive ;
and added that a salt tax was morally as well
as politically wrong, and in fact " was a species
of impiety."

But in attacking some of the abuses which
had developed out of the tariff of 1833 Benton
made a very shrewd and practical speech, with-
out permitting himself to indulge in any such
intellectual pranks as accompanied his salt ora-
tions. He especially aimed at reducing the
drawbacks on sugar, molasses, and one or two
other articles. In accordance with our whole
clumsy, hap-hazard system of dealing with the

I

LAST DATS OF JACKSONIAN DEMOCRACY. 229

tcriff we liad originally put very high duties on
the articles in question, and then bad allowed
correspondingly heavy drawbacks ; and yet,
when in 1833, by Clay's famous compromise
tariff bill, the duties were reduced to a frac-
tional part of what they had previously been,
no parallel reduction was made in the draw-
backs, although Benton (supported by Web-
ster) made a vain effort even then, while the
compromise bill was on its passage, to have the
injustice remedied. As a consequence, the ex-
porters of sugar and rum, instead of drawing
back the exact amounts paid into the treasury,
drew back several times as much ; and the ri-
diculous result was that certain exporters were
paid a naked bounty out of the treasury, and
received pay for doing and suffering nothing.
In 1889 the drawback paid on the exportation
of refined suijar exceeded the amount of revenue
derived from imported sugar by over twenty
thousand dollars. Benton showed this clearl}^
by unimpeachable statistics, and went on to
prove that in that year the whole amount of
the revenue from brown and clayed sugar, plus
the above-mentioned twenty thousand dollars,
was paid over to twenty-nine sugar refiners ;
and that these men thus " drew back " from
the treasury what they had never put into it.
A buses equally gross existed in relation to va-

230 THOMAS HART BENTON.

rious other articles. But in spite of the clear
justice of bis case Benton was able at first to
make but little impression on Congress ; and
it was some time before matters were straight-
ened out, as all the protective interests felt
obliged to make common cause with each other,
no matter what evils might be perpetrated by
their taking such action.

Towards the close of Van Buren's administra-
tion, when he was being assailed on every side,
as well for what Jackson as for what he himself
had done or left undone, one of the chief accu-
sations brought against him was that he had
squandered the public money, and that, since
Adams had been ousted from the presidency,
the expenses of running the government had
increased out of all proportion to what was
proper. There was good ground for their com-
plaint, as the waste and peculation in some of
the departments had been very great ; but Ben=
ton, in an elaborate defense of both Jackson
and Van Buren, succeeded in showing that at
least certain of the accusations were unfounded
— although he had to stretch a point or two in
trying to make good his claim that the admin-
istration was really economical, being reduced
to the rather lame expedient of ruling out about
two thirds of the expenditures on the ground
that they were *' extraordinary,"

LAST DAYS OF JACKS ON /AN DEMOCRACY. 231

The charge of extravagance was one of the
least of the charges urged against the Jacksonian
Democrats during the last days of their rule.
While they had been in power the character of
the public service had deteriorated frightfully,
both as regarded its efficiency and infinitely
more as regarded its honesty ; and under Van
Buren the amount of money stolen by the pub-
lic officers, compared to the amount handed in
to the treasury, was greater than ever before
or since. For this the Jacksonians were solely
and absolutely responsible ; they drove out the
merit system of making appointments, and in-
troduced the " spoils " system in its place ; and
under the latter they chose a peculiarly dis-
honest and incapable set of officers, whose sole
recommendation was to be found in the knav-
ish trickery and low cunning that enabled them
to manage the ignorant voters who formed the
backbone of Jackson's party. The statesmen
of the Democracy in after days forgot the good
deeds of the Jacksonians ; they lost their at-
tachment to the Union, and abandoned their
championship of hard money ; but they never
ceased to cling to the worst legacy their prede-
cessors had left them. The engrafting of the
" spoils " system on our government was, of all
the results of Jacksonian rule, the one which
was most permanent in its effects.

232 THOMAS HART BENTON,

All these causes — the corruption of the pub-
lic officials, the extravagance of the govern-
ment, and the widespread distress, which might
be regarded as the aftermath of its ruinous
financial policy — combined with others that
were as little to the discredit of the Jackso-
nians as they were to the credit of the Whigs,
brought about the overthrow of the former.
There was much poetic justice in the fact that
the presidential election which decided their
fate was conducted on as purely irrational prin-
j ciples, and was as merely one of sound and
fury, as had been tlie case in the election twelve
years previously, when they came into power.
The Whigs, having exhausted their language
in denouncing their opponents for nominating
a man like Andrew Jackson, proceeded to look
about in their own party to find one who should
come as near him as possible in all the attri-
butes that had given him so deep a hold on
the people ; and they succeeded perfectly when
they pitched on the old Indian fighter, Harrison.
" Tippecanoe " proved quite as effective a war-
cry in bringing about the downfall of the Jack-
sonians as " Old Hickory " had shown itself to
be a dozen years previously in raising them up.
General Harrison had already shown himself to
be a good soldier, and a loyal and honest pub-
lic servant, although by no means standing in

LAST DAYS OF JACKSONTAN DEMOCRACY. 233

the first rank either as regards war - craft or
state-craft ; but the mass of his supporters ap-
parently considered the facts, or supposed facts,
that he lived in a log-cabin the walls of which
were decorated with coon-skins, and that he
drank hard cider from a gourd, as being more
important than his capacity as a statesman or
his past services to the nation.

The Whigs having thus taken a shaft from
the Jacksonians' quiver, it was rather amusing
to see the latter, in their turn, hold up their
hands in horror at the iniquity of what would
now be called a " hurrah " canvass ; blandly ig-
noring the fact that it was simply a copy of
their own successful proceedings. Says Ben-
ton, with amusing gravity : " The class of in-
ducements addressed to the passions and im-
aginations of the people was such as history
blushes to record," a remark that provokes crit-
icism, when it is remembered that Benton had
been himself a prominent actor on the Jack-
sonian side in the campaigns of '28 and '32,
when it was exclusively to " the passions and
imaginations of the people " that all arguments
were addressed.

The Democrats did not long remain out of

power; and they kept the control of the gov-

W ern mental policy in their hands pretty steadily

until the time of the civil war ; nevertheless it

234 THOMAS HART BENTON.

is true that with the defeat of Van Buren the
Jacksonian Democracy, as such, lost forever
its grip on the direction of national affairs.
When, under Polk, the Democrats came back,
they came under the lead of the very men
whom the original Jackson ians had opposed
and kept down. With all their faults, Jack-
son and Benton were strong Union men, and
under them their party was a Union party.
Calhoun and South Carolina, and the disunion-
ists in the other Southern States were their bit-
ter foes. But the disunion and extreme slav-
ery elements within the Democratic ranks were
increasing rapidly all the time ; and they had
obtained complete and final control when the
party reappeared as victors after their defeat in
1840. Until Van Buren's overthrow the na-
tionalists had held the upper hand in shaping
Democratic policy ; but after that event the
leadership of the party passed completely into
the hands of the separatists.

The defeat of Van Buren marks an era in
more ways than one. During his administra-
tion slavery played a less prominent part in
politics than did many other matters ; this was
never so again. His administration was the
last in which this question, or the question
springing from it, did not overtop and dwarf in
Importance all others. Again, the presidential

LAST BAYS OF JACKSONIAN DEMOCRACY. 235

election of 1840 was the last into which slavery
did not enter as a most important, and in fact
as the vital and determining factor. In the
contest between Van Buren and Harrison it did
not have the least influence upon the result.
Moreover, Van Buren was the last Democratic
president who ruled over a Union of states ; all
his successors, up to the time of Lincoln's elec-
tion, merely held sway over a Union of sec-
tions. The spirit of separation had identified
itself with the maintenance of slavery, and the
South was rapidly uniting into a compact array
of states witli interests that were hostile to the
North on the point most vitally affecting the
welfare of the whole country.

No great question involving the existence
of slavery was brought before the attention of
Congress during Van Buren's term of office ;
nor was the matter mooted except in the eter-
nal wrangles over receiving the abolitionist pe-
titions. Benton kept silent in these discussions,
although voting to receive the petitions. As
he grew older he continually grew wiser, and
better able to do good legislative work on all
subjects ; but he was not yet able to realize
that the slavery question was one which could
not be kept down, and whicli was bound to
force itself into the sphere of national politics.
He still insisted that it was only dragged be-

236 THOMAS HART BENTON.

fore Congress by a few fanatics at the North,
and that in the South it was made the instru-
ment by which designing and unscrupulous men
wished to break up the federal republic. His
devotion to the Union, ever with him the chief
and overmastering thought, made him regard
with horror and aversion any man, at the North
or at the South, who brought forward a ques-
tion so frauglit with peril to its continuance.
He kept trying to delude himself into the be-
lief that the discussion and the danger would
alike gradually die away, and the former state
of peaceful harmony between the sections, and
freedom from disunion excitement, would re-
turn.

But the time for such an ending already
lay in the past ; thereafter the outlook was to
grow steadily darker year by year. Slavery
lowered like a thunder-storm on the horizon ;
and though sometimes it might seem for a
moment to break away, yet in reality it had
reached that stage when, until the final all-
engulfing outburst took place, the clouds were
bound for evermore to return after the rain.

CHAPTER XL
THE PRESIDENT WITHOUT A PARTY.

The Whigs in 1840 completely overthrew
the Democrats, and for the first time elected
a president and held the majority in both
houses of Congress. Yet, as it turned out, all
that they really accomplished was to elect a
president without a party, for Harrison died
when he had hardly more than sat in the pres-
idential chair, and was succeeded by the vice-
president, Tyler of Virginia.

Harrison was a true Whig ; he was, when
nominated, a prominent member of the Whig
party, although of course not to be compared
with its great leader, Henry Clay, or with its
most mighty intellectual chief and champion
in the Northeast, Daniel Webster, whose mu-
tual rivalry had done much to make his nomi-
nation possible. Tyler, however, could hardly
be called a Whig at all ; on the contrary, he
belonged rightfully in the ranks of those ex-
treme Democrats who were farthest removed
from the Whig standard, and who were as

238 THOMAS HART BENTON.

mucli displeased with the Union sentiments
of the Jacksonians as they were with the per-
sonal tyranny of Jackson himself. He was
properly nothing but a dissatisfied Democrat,
who hated the Jacksonians, and had been
nominated only because the Whig politicians
wished to strengthen their ticket and insure
its election by bidding for the votes of the dis-
contented in the ranks of their foes. Now a
chance stroke of death put the presidency in
the hands of one who represented this, the
smallest, element in the coalition that over-
threw Van Bur en.

The principles of the Whigs were hazily out-
lined at the best, and the party was never a
very creditable organization ; indeed, through-
out its career, it could be most easil}^ defined as
the opposition to the Democracy. It was a free
constructionist party, believing in giving a lib-
eral interpretation to the doctrines of the Con-
stitution ; otherwise, its principles were purely
economic, as it favored a high tariff, internal
improvements, a bank, and kindred schemes ;
and its leaders, however they might quarrel
among themselves, agreed thoi'oughly in their
devout hatred of Jackson and all his works.

It was on this last point only that Tyler
came in. His principles had originally been
ultra-Democratic. He had been an extreme

THE PRESIDENT WITH OUT A PARTY. 239

strict constructionist, had belonged to that wing
of the Democracy which inclined more and
more towards separation, and had thus, on sev-
eral grounds, found himself opposed to Jack-
son, Benton, and their followers. Indeed, he
went into opposition to his original party for
reasons akin to those that influenced Calhoun ;
and Seward's famous remark about the '' ill-
starred coalition between Whigs and Nulli-
fiers " might with certain changes have been
applied to the presidential election of 1840
quite as well as to the senatorial struggles to
which it had reference.

Tyler, however, had little else in common
with Calhoun, and least of all his intellect.
i He has been called a mediocre man ; but this
is unwarranted flattery. He was a politician
of monumental littleness. Owing to the nicely-
divided condition of parties, and to the sheer
accident which threw him into a position of
such prominence that it allowed him to hold
the balance of power between them, he was en-
abled to turn politics completely topsj^-turvy ;
but his chief mental and moral attributes were
• peevishness, fretful obstinacy, inconsistency, in-
capacity to make up his own mind, and the
ability to quibble indefinitely over the most mi-
croscopic and hair-splitting plays upon words,
together with an inordinate vanity that so

^?N

240 THOMAS HART BENTON.

I blinded him to all outside feeling as to make
I him really think that he stood a chance to be
\ renominated for the presidency.

The Whigs, especially in the Senate, under
Henry Clay, prepared at once to push through
various measures that should undo the work of
the Jacksonians. Clay was boastfully and dom-
ineeringly sure of the necessity of applying to
actual governmental work the economic the-
ories that formed the chief stock in trade of
his party. But it was precisely on these eco-
nomic theories that Tyler split off from the
Whigs. The result was that very shortly the
real leader of the dominant party, backed by
almost all his fellow party men in both houses
of Congress, was at daggers drawn with the
nominal Whig president, who in his turn was
supported only by a " corporal's guard " of fol-
lowers in the House of Representatives, by all
the office - holders whom fear of removal re-
duced to obsequious subserviency, and by a
knot of obscure politicians who used him for
their own ends, and worked alternately on his
vanity and on his fears. The Democrats, led
by Benton, played out their own game, and
were the only parties to the three-cornered
fight who came out of it with profit. The de-
tails now offer rather dry reading, as the eco-
nomic theories of all the contestants were more

THE PRESIDENT WITHOUT A PARTY. 241

or less crude, the results of the conflict inde-
cisive, and the effects upon our history ephemv

eral.

Clay began by a heated revival of one of
Jackson's worst ideas, namely, that when the
people elect a president they thereby mark
with the seal of their approval any and every
measure with which that favored mortal or his
advisers may consider themselves identified,
and indorse all his and their previous actions.
He at once declared that the people had shown,
by the size of Harrison's majority, that they
demanded the repeal of the independent treas-
ury act, and the passage of various other laws
in accordance with some of his own favorite
hobbies, two out of three voters, as a matter
of fact, probably never having given a second
thought to any of them. Accordingly he pro-
ceeded to introduce a whole batch of bills,
which he alleged that it was only yielding due
respect to the spirit of Democracy to pass forth-
with.

Benton, however, even outdid Clay in paying
homage to what he was pleased to call the
*' democratic idea." At this time he speaks of
the last session of the Twenty-Sixth Congress
as being " barren of measures, and necessarily
so, as being the last of an administration super-
seded by the popular voice and soon to expire ;

16

242 THOMAS HART BENTON.

and therefore restricted by a sense of propriety^
during the brief remainder of its existence, to the
details of business and the routine of service."
According to this theory an interregnum of
some sixteen weeks would intervene between
the terms of service of every two presidents.
He also speaks of Tyler as having, when the
legislature of Virginia disapproved of a course
he wished to follow, resigned his seat " in obe-
dience to the democratic principle," which, ac-
cording to his views, thus completely nullified
the section of the Constitution providing for a
six years' term of service in the Senate. In
truth Benton, like most other Jacksonian and
Jeffersonian leaders, became both foolish and
illogical when he began to talk of the bundle of
vague abstractions, which he knew collectively
as the " democratic principle." Although not
so bad as many of his school he had yet gradu-
ally worked himself up to a belief that it was
almost impious to pay anything but servile heed
to the " will of the majority ; " and was quite
unconscious that to surrender one's own manhood
and judgment to a belief in the divine right of
kings was only one degree more ignoble, and
was not a shadow more logical, and but little
more defensible, than it was blindly to deify a
majority — not of the whole people, but merely
of a small fraction consisting of those who hap

THE PRESIDENT WITHOUT A PARTY. 243

pened to be of a certain sex, to have reached a
certain age, to belong to a certain race, and to
fulfill some other conditions. In fact there is
no natural or divine law in the matter at all ;
how large a portion of the population should
be trusted with the control of the government
is a question of expediency merely. In any
purely native American community manhood
suffrage works infinitely better than would any
other system of government, and throughout
our country at large, in spite of the large num-
ber of ignorant foreign-born or colored voters,
it is probably preferable as it stands to any
modification of it ; but there is no more '' nat-
ural right " why a white man over twenty-one
should vote than there is why a negro woman
under eighteen should not. " Civil rights " and
" personal freedom " are not terms that neces-
sarily imply the right to vote. People make
mistakes when governing themselves, exactly as
they make mistakes when governing others ;
all that can be said is, that in the former case
their self-interest is on the side of good govern-
ment, whereas in the latter it always may be,
and often must be, the reverse; so that, when
any people reaches a certain stage of mental
development and of capacity to take care of its
own concerns, it is far better that it should it-
self take the reins. The distinctive features of

244 THOMAS HART BENTON,

tlie American system are its guarantees of per-
sonal independence and individual freedom ;
that is, as far as possible, it guarantees to each
man his riglit to live as he chooses and to regu-
late his own private affairs as he wishes, with-
out being interfered with or tyrannized over by
an individual, or by an oligarchic minority, or
by a democratic majority ; while, when the in-
terests of the whole community are at stake, it
is found best in the long run to let them be man-
aged in accordance with the wishes of the ma-
jority of those presumably concerned.

Clay's flourish of trumpets foreboded trouble
and disturbance to the Jacksonian camp. At
last he stood at the head of a party controlling
both branches of the legislative body, and de-
voted to his behests ; and, if a little doubtful
about the president, he still believed he could
frigliten him into doing as he was bid. He
had long been in the minority, and had seen
his foes ride roughshod over all he most believed
in ; and now he prepared to pay them back in
their own coin and to leave a heavy balance on
his side of the reckoning. Nor could any Jack-
sonian have shown himself more domineering
and influenced by a more insolent disregard for
the rights of others than Clay did in his hour
of triumph. On the other side, Benton braced
himself with dogged determination for the

THE PRESIDENT WITHOUT A PARTY. 245

struggle ; for he was one of those men who
fight a losing or a winning battle with equal
resolution.

Tyler's first message to Congress read like a
pretty good Whig document. It did not dis-
play any especial signs of his former strict con-
struction theories, and gave little hope to the
Democrats. The leader of the latter, indeed,
Benton, commented upon both it and its author
with rather grandiloquent severity, on account
of its latitudinarian bias, and of its recommen-
dation of a bank of some sort. However, the
ink with which the message was written could
hardly have been dry before the president's
mind began to change. He himself probably
had very little idea what he intended to do, and
so contrived to give the Whigs the impression
that he would act in accordance with their
wishes ; but the leaven had already begun
working in his mind, and, not having much to
work on, soon changed it so completely that he
was willing practically to eat his own words.

Shortly after Tyler had sent in his message
outlining what legislation he deemed proper, he
being by virtue of his position the nominal and
titular leader of the Whigs, Clay, who was their
real and very positive chief, and who was, more-
over, determined to assert his chieftainship, in
his turn laid down a programme for his party to

246 THOyfAS HART BEXTOy.

follow, introducing a series of resolutions de-
claring it necessary to pass a bill to repeal the
sub-treasurv act, another to establish a bank,
another to distribute the proceeds of the public
land sales, and one or two more, to which was
afterwards added a bankruptcy measure.

The sub-tre<isury bdl was first taken up and
promptly passed and signed. Benton, of course,
led the hopeless fight against it, making a long
and elaborate speech, insisting that the finances
were in excellent shape, as they were, showing
the advantages of hard money, and denouncing
the bill on account of the extreme suddenness
with which it took effect, and because it made
no provision for any substitute. He also al-
luded caustically to the curious and anomalous
bank bill, which was then being patched up by
the Whig leaders so as to get it into some
such shape that the president would sign it.

The other three important measures, that is,
the bank, distribution, and bankruptcy bills,
were all passed nearly together ; as Benton
pointed out, they were got through only by a
species of bargain and sale, the chief supporters
of each agreeing to support the other, so as to
get their own pet measure through. *' All
must go together or fall together. This is the
decree out of doors. When the sun dips below
the horizon a private congress is held ; the fate

THE PRESIDENT WITHOUT A PARTY. 247

of the measures is decided ; a bundle is tied
to;^ether ; and while one goes ahead as a bait,
another is held back as a rod."

The bankruptcy bill went through and was
signed. It was urged by all the large debtor
class, whose ranks had been filled to overflowing
bv the years of wild speculation and general
bank suspension and insolvency. These debtors
were quite numerous enough to constitute an
important factor in politics, but Benton disre-
garded them nevertheless, and fought the bill
as stoutly as he did its companions, alleging
that it was a crross outrage on honestv and on
the ricrhts of property, and was not a bankrupt
law at all, but practically an insolvent law for
the abolition of debts at the will of the debtor.
He pointed out grave and numerous defects of
detail, and gave an exhaustive abstract of bank-
ruptcy legislation in general : the speech gave
evidence of the tireless industry and. wide range
of learning for which Benton was preeminently
distinguished.

The third bill to be taken up and passed was
that providing for the distribution of the public
lands revenue, and thus indirectly for assuming
the debts of the states. Tvler. in his message,
had characteristically stated that, though it
would be wholly unconstitutional for the fed-
eral government to assume the debts of the

248 THOMAS HART BENTON.

states, yet it would be biglily proper for it to
give the latter money wherewith to pay them.
Clay had always been an enthusiastic advocate
of a distribution bill ; and accordingly one was
now passed and signed with the least possible
delay. It was an absolutely indefensible meas-
ure. The treasury was empty, and loan and
tax bills were pending at the very moment, in
order to supply money for the actual running
of the government. As Benton pointed out,
Congress had been called together (a special
session havinir been summoned by Harrison be-
f(H-e liis death) to raise revenue, and the first
thing done was to squander it. Tiie distribu-
tion took place when the treasury leports
showed a deficit of sixteen millions of dollars.
The bill was pushed throngh mainly by the
states which had re])iidlated their debts in
whole or in part ; and as these debts were |
largely owed abroad, many prominent foreign
banking-houses and individuals took an active 1
part in lobbying for the bill. Benton was em-
])hatically right in his opposition to the measure,
but he was ver}' wrong in some of the grounds
he took. Thus he inveighed vigorously against
the foreign capitalists who had come to help
push the bill through Congress ; but he did not
have anything to say against the scoundrelly
dishonesty displayed by certain states towards

TEE PRESIDENT WITHOUT A PARTY. 249

tlieir creditors, which had forced these capital-
ists into the endeavor to protect themselves.
He also incidentally condemned the original
assumption by the national government of the
debts of the states, at the time of the formation
of the Constitution, which was an absolute ne-
cessity ; and his constitutional views through-
out seem rather strained. But he was right
beyond cavil on the main point. It was crim-
inal folly to give the states the impression that
they would be allowed to create debts over
which Congress could have no control, yet
which Congress in the end would give them
the money to pay. To reward a state for re-
pudiating a debt by giving her the wherewithal
to pay it was a direct and unequivocal encour-
agement of dishonesty. In every respect the
bill was wholly improper; and Benton's atti-
tude towards it and towards similar schemes
was incomparably better than the position of
Clay, Webster, and the other Whigs.

Both the bankrupt bill and the distribution
bill were repealed very shortly ; the latter be-
fore it had time to take effect. This was an
emphatic indorsement by the public of Benton's
views, and a humiliating rebuke to the Whig
authors of the measures. Indeed, the whole
legislation of the session was almost absolutely
fruitless in its results.

250 THOMAS HART BENTON.

One feature of the struggle was an attempt
by Clay, promptly and successfully resisted by
Benton and Calhoun, to institute the hour limit
for speeches in the Senate. There was a good
deal of excuse for Clay's motion. The House
could cut off debate by the previous question,
which the Senate could not, and nevertheless
had found it necessary to establish the hour
limit in addition. Of course it is highly unde-
sirable that there should not be proper freedom
of debate in Congress ; but it is quite as hurtful
to allow a minority to exercise their privileges
improperly. The previous question is often
abused and used tyrannically ; but on the whole
it is a most invaluable aid to legislation. Ben-
ton, however, waxed hot and wrathful over the
proposed change in the Senate rules. He, with
Calhoun and their followers, had been consum-
ing an immense amount of time in speech-mak-
ing against the Whig measures, and in offering
amendments ; not with any hopes of bettering
the bills, but for outside effect, and to annoy
their opponents. He gives an amusingly naive
account of their course of action, and the rea-
sons for it, substantially as follows : —

The Democratic senators acted upon a system, and
witli a thorough organization and a perfect under-
standing. Being a minority, and able to do nothing,
they became assailants, and attacked incessantly ; not

THE PRESIDENT WITHOUT A PARTY. 251

by formal orations against the whole body of a meas-
ure, but by sudden, short, and pungent speeches di'
rected against the vulnerable parts, and pointed by
proffered amendments. Amendments were continu-
ally offered — a great number being prepared every
night and placed in suitable hands for use the next
day — always commendably calculated to expose an
evil and to present a remedy. Near forty proposi-
itions of amendment were offered to the first fiscal
agent bill alone — the yeas and nays were taken upon
them seven and thirty times. All the other promi-
nent bills — distribution, bankrupt, fiscal corporation,
new tariff act, called revenue — were served the same
way ; every proposed amendment made an issue.
There were but twenty-two of us, but every one was
a speaker and effective. The " Globe " newspaper
was a powerful ally, setting out all we did to the best
advantage in strong editorials, and carrying out our
speeches, fresh and hot, to the people ; and we felt
victorious in the midst of unbroken defeats.

It is no wonder that such rank filibustering,
coupled with the exasperating self-complacency
of its originators, should have excited in Whig
bosoms every desperate emotion short of homi-
cidal mania.

Clay, to cut off such useless talk, gave notice
that he would move to have the time for debate
for each individual restricted ; remarking very
truthfully that he did not believe the people j
at large would complain of the abridgment of \.

b

252 THOMAS HART BENTON.

speeches in Congress. But the Democratic sen-
ators, all rather fond of windy orations, fairly-
foamed at the mouth at what they affected to
deem such an infringement of their liberties ;
and actually took the inexcusable resolution of
bidding defiance to the rule if it was adopted,
and refusing to obey it, no matter what degree
of violence their conduct might bring about, —
a resolution that was wholly unpardonable.
Benton was selected to voice their views upon
the matter, which he did in a long, and not
very wise speech ; while Calhoun was quite as
emphatic in his threats of what would happen
if attempt should be made to enforce the pro-
posed rule. Clay was always much bolder in
opening a campaign than in carrying it through;
and when it came to putting his words into
deeds, he wholly lacked the nerve which would
have enabled him to contend with two such
men as the senators from Missouri and South
Carolina. Had he possessed a temperament
like that of either of his opponents, he would
have gone on and have simply forced acquies-
cence ; for any legislative body can certainly
enforce what rules it may choose to make as to
the conduct of its own members in addressing
it ; but his courage failed him, and he withdrew
from the contest, leaving the victory with the
Democrats.

THE PRESIDENT WITHOUT A PARTY. 253

When the question of the re-charter of the
district banks came up, it of course gave Benton
another chance to attack his favorite foe. He
offered a very proper amendment, which was
voted down, to prohibit the banks from issuing
a currency of small notes, fixing upon twenty
dollars as being the lowest limit. This he sup-
ported in a strong speech, wherein he once
again argued at length in favor of a gold and
silver currency, and showed the evil effects of
small bank-notes, which might not be, and often
were not, redeemable at par. He very properly
pointed out that to have a sound currency, es-
pecially in all the smaller denominations, was
really of greater interest to the working men
than to any one else.

The great measure of the session, however,
and the one that was intended to be the final
crown and glory of the Whig triumph, was the
bill to establish a new national bank. Among
the political theories to which Clay clung most
closely, only the belief in a bank ranked higher
in his estimation than his devotion to a protec-
tive tariff. The establishment of a national
bank seemed to him to be the chief object of a
Whig success ; and that it would work imme=
diate and immense benefit to the country was
with him an article of faith. With both houses
of Congress under his control, he at once pre-

254 THOMAS HART BENTON.

pared to push his pet measure through, impa-
tiently brushing aside all resistance.

But at the very outset ditticulty was feared
from the action of the president. / Tyler could
/ not at first make up his mind what to do; or
\ rather, he made it up in half a dozen different
ways every day. His peevishness, vacillation,
"- ambitious vanity, and sheer puzzle-headed ness
made him incline first to the side of his new
friends and present supporters, the Whigs, and
\^then to that of his old democratic allies^whose
views on the bank, as on most other questions,
he had so often openly expressed himself as
sharing. lUit tliougli his mind oscillated like
a pendulum, yet each time it swung farther
and farther over to the side of the Democracy,
and it began to look as if he would certainly
in the end come to a halt in the camp of the
enemies of the Whigs ; his ;ii)proach to this
destination was merely hastened by Clay's over-
bearing violence and injudicious taunts.

However, at first Tyler did not dare to come
out openly against any and all bank laws, but
tried to search round for some compromise
measure ; and as he could not invent a com-
promise in fact, he came to the conclusion that
one in words would do just as well. He said
that his conscience would not permit him to
sign a bill to establish a bank that was called

I

THE PRESIDENT WITHOUT A PARTY. 255

a bank, but that he was willing to sign a bill
establishing such an institution provided that it
was called something else, though it should poss-
sess all the properties of a bank. Such a pro-
posal opened a wide field for the endless quib-
bling in which his soul delighted.

The secretary of the treasury, in response to
a call from the Senate, furnished a plan for a
bank, having modeled it studiously so as to
overcome the president's scruples ; and a select
committee of the Senate at once shaped a bill
in accordance with the plans. Said Benton :
*' Even the title was made ridiculous to please
the president, though not so much so as he
wished. He objected to the name of bank
either in the title or the body of the charter,
and proposed to style it ' Fiscal Institute ; ' and
afterwards the ' Fiscal Agent,' and finally the
' Fiscal Corporation. ' " Such preposterous folly
on the president's part was more than the hot-
blooded and overbearing Kentuckian could
stand ; and, in spite of his absorbing desire for
the success of his measure, and of the vital ne-
cessity for conciliating Tyler, Clay could not
bring himself to adopt such a ludicrous title,
even though he had seen that the charter pro-
vided that the institution, whatever it might be
styled in form, should in fact have all the prop-
erties of a bank. After a while, however, a

256

THOMAS FART BENTON.

compromise title was agreed on, but only a
shadow less imbecile than the original one pro-
posed by the president ; and it was agreed to
call the measure the '' Fiscal Bank " bill.

The president vetoed it, but stated that he
was ready to approve any similar bill that
should be free from the objections he named.
Clay could not resist reading Tyler a lecture on
his misconduct, during the course of a speech in
the Senate ; but the Whigs generally smothered
their resentment, and set about preparing some-
thing which the president would sign, and this
time concluded that thev would humor him to
the top of his bent, even by choosing a title as
ridiculous as he wished ; so they styled their
bill one to estabhsh a ''Fiscal Corporation."
Benton held the title up to well-deserved deri-
sion, and showed that, though there had been
quite an elaborate effort to disguise the form of
the measure, and to make it purport to establish
a bank that should have the properties of a
treasury, yet that in reality it was simply a re-
vival of the old scheme under another name.
The Whigs swallowed the sneers of their oppo-
nents as best they could, and passed their bill.

The president again interposed his veto. An
intrigue was going on among a few unimpor-
tant congressmen and obscure office-holders to
form a new party with Tyler at its head ; and

THE PRESIDENT WITHOUT A PARTY. 257

the latter willingly entered into the plan, his
mind, which was not robust at the best, being
completely dazzled by his sudden elevation and
his wild hopes that he could continue to keep
the place which he had reached. He had given
the Whigs reason to expect that he would sign
the bill, and had taken none of his cabinet into
his confidence. So, when his veto came in, it
raised a perfect whirlwind of wrath and bitter
disappointment. His cabinet all resigned, ex-
cept Webster, who stayed to finish the treaty
with Great Britain ; and the Whigs formally
read him out of the party. The Democrats
looked on with huge enjoyment, and patted
Tyler on the back, for they could see that he
was bringing their foes to ruin ; but neverthe-
less they despised him heartil}^, and abandoned
him wholly when he had served their turn.
Left without any support among the regulars
of either side, and his own proposed third party
turning out a still-born abortion, \he simply,
played out his puny part until his term ended, \
and then dropped noiselessly out of sight. It is J
only the position he filled, and not in the least \
his ability, for either good or bad, in filling it, ;
that prevents his name from sinking into mer-
ciful oblivion. ^

There was yet one more brief spasm over the

bank, however; the president sending in a plan
17

258 THOMAS HART BENTON.

for a " Fiscal Agent," to be called a Board of
Exchequer. Congress contemptuously refused
to pay any attention to the proposition, Benton
showing its utter unworthiness in an excellent
speech, one of the best that he made on the
whole financial question.

Largely owing to the cross purposes at which
the president and his party were working, the
condition of the treasury became very bad. It
sought to provide for its immediate wants by
the issue of treasury notes, differing from for-
mer notes of the kind in that they were made
reissuable. Benton at once, and very properly,
attacked this proceeding. He had a check
drawn for a few days' compensation as senator,
demanded payment in hard money, and when
he was given treasury notes instead, made a
most emphatic protest in the Senate, which was
entirely effectual, the practically compulsory
tender of the paper money being forthwith
stopped.

It was at this time, also, that bills to subsi-
dize steamship Hues were first passed, and that
the enlarging and abuse of the pension system
began, which in our own day threatens to be-
come a really crying evil. Benton opposed both
sets of measures ; and in regard to the pension
matter showed that he would not let himself,
by any specious plea of exceptional suffering or

THE PRESIDENT WITHOUT A PARTY. 259

need for charity, be led into vicious special legis-
lation, sure in the end to bring about the break,
ing down of some of the most important princi-
ples of governmento

CHAPTER XII.
BOUNDARY TROUBLES WITH ENGLAND.

Two important controversies with foreign
powers became prominent during Tyler's presi-
dency ; but he had little to do with the settle-
ment of either, beyond successively placing in
his cabinet the two great statesmen who dealt
with them. Webster, while secretary of state,
brought certain of the negotiations with Eng-
land to a close ; and later on, Calhoun, while
holding the same office, took up Webster's work
and also grappled with — indeed partly caused
— the troubles on the Mexican border, and
turned them to the advantage of the South and
slavery.

Our boundaries were still very ill-defined, ex-
cept where they were formed by the Gulf and
the Ocean, the Great Lakes, and the river St.
John. Even in the Northeast, where huge
stretches of unbroken forest-land separated the
inhabited portions of Canada from those of New
England, it was not yet decided how much of
this wilderness belonged to us and how much

i

I

BOUNDARY TROUBLES WITH ENGLAND. 261

to the Canadians ; and in the vast, unsettled
reirions of the far West our chiims came into
direct conflict with those of Mexico and of
Great Britain. The ownership of these little
known and badly mapped regions could with
great difficulty be decided on grounds of absolute
and abstract right ; the title of each contestant
to the land was more or less plausible, and at the
same time more or less defective. The matter
was sure to be decided in favor of the strong-
est ; and, say what we will about the justice and
right of the various claims, the honest truth is,
that the comparative might of the different na-
tions, and not the comparative righteousness of
their several causes, was the determining factor
in the settlement. Mexico lost her northern
provinces by no law of right, but simply by the
law of the longest sword — the same law that
gave India to England. In both instances the
result was greatly to the benefit of tlie con-
quered peoples and of every one else ; though
there is this wide difference between the two
cases : that whereas the English rule in India,
while it may last for decades or even for centu-
ries, must eventually come to an end and leave
little trace of its existence ; on the other hand
our conquests from Mexico determined for all
time the blood, speech, and law of the men who
should fill the lands we won.

262 T no MAS HART BENTON.

The questions between Great Britain and our-
selves were compromised by each side accept-
ing about half what it claimed, only because
neither was willing to push the other to extrem-
ties. Englishmen like Palmerston might hector
and ruffle, and Americans like Benton might
swagger and bully ; but when it came to be a
question of actual fighting each people recog-
nized tlie power of the other, and preferred to
follow the more cautious and peaceful, not to
say timid, lead of such statesmen as Webster
and Lord Melbourne. Had we been no stronger
than the Sikhs, Oregon and Washington would
at present be British possessions ; and if Great
Britain had been as weak as Mexico, she would
not now hold a foot of territory on the Pacific
coast. Either nation might perhaps have re-
fused to commit a gross and entirely unpro-
voked and uncalled-for act of aggression ; but
each, under altered conditions, would have
readily found excuses for showing much less re-
gard for the claims of the other than actually
was shown. It would be untrue to say that
nations have not at times proved themselves
capable of acting with great disinterestedness
and generosity towards other peoples ; but such
conduct is not very common at the best, and
although it often may be desirable, it certainly
is not always so. If the matter in dispute is

BOUNDARY TROUBLES WITH ENGLAND. 263

of great importance, and if there is a doubt as
to which side is right, then the strongest party
to the controversy is pretty sure to give itself
the benefit of that doubt ; and international
morality will have to take tremendous strides
in advance before this ceases to be the case.

It is difiicult to exaggerate the importance of
the treaties and wars by means of which we
finally gave definite bounds to our territory be-
yond the Mississippi. Contemporary political
writers and students, of the lesser sort, are al-
ways painfully deficient in the sense of historic
perspective ; and to such the struggles for the
possession of the unknown and dimly outlined
western wastes seemed of small consequence
compared to similar European contests for ter-
ritorial aggrandizement. Yet, in reality, when
we look at the far-reaching nature of the results,
the questions as to what kingdom should receive
the fealty of Holstein or Lorraine, of Savoy or
the Dobrudscha, seem of absolutely trivial im-
portance compared to the infinitely more mo-
mentous ones as to the future race settlement
and national ownership of the then lonely and
unpeopled lands of Texas, California, and Ore-
gon.

Benton, greatly to the credit of his foresighi,
and largely in consequence of his strong nation-
alist feeling, thoroughly appreciated the impOJ*-

264

THOMAS HART BENTON.

tance of our geographical extensions. He was
the great champion of the West and of western
development, and a furious partisan of every
movement in the direction of the enlargement
of our western boundaries. Many of his ex-
pressions, when talking of the greatness of our
country and of the magnitude of the interests
which were being decided, not only were gran-
diloquent in manner, but also seem exaggerated
and overwrought even as regards matter. But
when we think of the interests for which he
contended, as they were to become, and not as
they at the moment were, the appearance of ex-
aggeration is lost, and the intense feeling of his
speeches no longer seems out of place or dis-
proportionate to the importance of the subject
with which he dealt. Without clearly formu-
lating his opinions, even to himself, and while
sometimes prone to attribute to his country at
the moment a greatness she was not to possess
for two or three generations to come, he, never-
theless, had engrained in his very marrow and
fibre the knowledge that inevitably, and beyond
all doubt, the coming years were to be hers.
He knew that, while other nations held the
past, and shared with his own the present, yet
that to her belonged the still formless and un-
shaped future. More clearly than almost any
other statesman he beheld the grandeur of the

BOUNDARY TROUBLES WITH ENGLAND. 265

nation loom up, viist and shadowy, through the
advancing years.

He was keenly alive to the need of our having
free chance to spread towards the northwest ;
he very early grasped the idea that in that di-
rection we ought to have room for continental
development. In his earliest years, to be sure,
when the Mississippi seemed a river of the
remote western border, when nobody, not even
the hardiest trapper, had penetrated the bound-
less and treeless plains that stretch to the foot-
hills of the Rookies, and when the boldest
thinkers had not dared to suppose that we could
ever hold together as a people, when once scat-
tered over so wide a territory, he had stated in
a public speech that he considered the moun-
tains to be our natural frontier line to the west,
and the barrier beyond which we ought not to
pass, and had expressed his trust that on the
Pacific coast there would grow up a kindred
and friendly Republic. But very soon, as the
seemingly impossible became the actual, he him-
self changed, and ever afterwards held that we
should have, wherever possible, no boundaries
but the two Oceans.

Benton's violent and aggressive patriotism
undoubtedly led him to assume positions to-
wards foreign powers that were very repugnant
to the quiet, peacable, and order-loving portion

266 THOMAS HART BENTON.

of the community, especially when he gave vent
to the spirit of jealous antagonism which he felt
towards Great Britain, the power that held
sway over the wilderness bordering us on the
north. Yet the arrogant attitude he assumed
was more than justified by the destiny of the
great Republic ; and it would have been well
for all America if we had insisted even more
than we did upon the extension northward of
our boundaries. Not only the Columbia but
also the Red River of the North — and the Sas-
katchewan and Frazer as well — should lie
wholly within our limits, less for our own sake
than for the sake of the men who dwell along
their banks. Columbia, Saskatchewan, and
Manitoba would, as states of the American
Union, hold positions incomparably more impor-
tant, grander, and more dignified than they can
ever hope to reach either as independent com-
munities or as provincial dependencies of a for-
eign power that regards them with a kindly tol-
erance somewhat akin to contemptuous indiffer-
ence. Of course no one would wish to see these,
or any other settled communities, now added to
our domain by force ; we want no unwilling citi-
zens to enter our Union ; the time to have taken
the lands was before settlers came into them.
European nations war for the possession of
thicky settled districts which, if conquered, will

i

BOUNDARY TROUBLES WITH ENGLAND. 267

for centuries remain alien and hostile to the
conquerors; we, wiser in our generation, have
seized the waste solitudes that lay near us, the
limitless forests and never ending plains, and
the valleys of the great, lonely rivers ; and have
thrust our own sons into th«m to take posses-
sion ; and a score of years after each conquest
we see the conquered land teeming with a peo-
ple that is one with ourselves.

Benton felt that all the unoccupied land to
the northwest was by right our heritage, and
he was willing to do battle for it if necessary.
He was a perfect type of western American
statesmanship in his way of looking at our for-
eign relations ; he was always unwilling to com-
promise, being of that happy temperament
which is absolutely certain that its claims are
just and righteous in their entirety, and that it
would be v/rong to accept anything less than
all that is demanded ; he was willing to bully
if our rig;hts, as he deemed them, were not
granted us ; and he was perfectly ready to fight
if the bullying was unsuccessful. True, he did
not consistently carry through all his theories
to their logical consequences ; but it may well
be questioned whether, after all, his original
attitude towards Great Britain was not wiser,
looking to its probable remote results, than that
which was finally taken by the national govern-

268 THOMAS HART BENTON.

jnent, whose policy was on this point largely
shaped by the feeling among the richer and
more educated classes of the Northeast. These
classes have always been more cautious and
timid than any others in the Union, especially
in their way of looking at possible foreign
wars, and have never felt much of the spirit
which made the West stretch out impatiently
for new lands. Fortunately they have rarely
been able to control our territorial growth.

No foot of soil to which we had any title in
the Northwest should have been given up ; we
were the people who could use it best, and we
ought to have taken it all. The prize was well
worth winning, and would warrant a good deal
of risk being run. We bad even then grown
to be so strong that we were almost sure even-
tually to win in any American contest for con-
tinental supremacy. We were near by, our
foes far away — for the contest over the Co-
lumbia would Imve been settled in Canada.
We should have had hard fighting to be sure,
but sooner or later the result would have been
in our favor. There were no better soldiers in
the world than the men of Balaclava and Inker-
man, but the victors of Buena V'^ista and Cha-
pultepec were as good. Scott and Taylor were
not great generals, but they were, at least, the
equals of Lord Raghin ; and we did not have in

BOUNDARY TROUBLES WITH ENGLAND. 269

our service any such examples of abnormal mil-
itary inaptitude as Lords Lucan and Cardigan
and their kind.

It was of course to be expected that men
like Benton would bitterly oppose the famous
Ashburton treaty, which was Webster's crown-
ing work while secretary of state, and the only
conspicuous success of Tyler's administration.
The Ashburton treaty was essentially a compro-
mise between the extreme claims of the two
contestants, as was natural where the claims
were based on very unsubstantial grounds and
the contestants were of somewhat the same
strenorth. It was most beneficial in its imraedi-
ate effects ; and that it was a perfectly dignified
and proper treaty for America to make is best
proved by the virulent hostility with which
Palmerston and his followers assailed it as a
" surrender " on the part of England, while
Englishmen of the same staitip are to this day
never tired of lamenting the fact that they have
allowed our western boundaries to be pushed
so far to the north. But there appears to be
much excuse for Benton's attitude, when we
look at the treaty as one in a chain of incidents,
and with regard to its future results. Our ter-
ritorial quarrels with Great Britain were not
like those between most other powers. It
was for the interest of the whole western hemi

270 THOMAS HART BENTON.

sphere that no European nation should have
extensive possessions between the Atlantic and
the Pacific; and by right we should have given
ourselves the benefit of every doubt in all
territorial questions, and have shown ourselves
ready to make prompt appeal to the sword
whenever it became necessary as a last resort.

Still, as regards the Ashburton treaty itself,
it must be admitted that much of Benton's
opposition was merely factious and partisan,
on account of its being a Whig measure; and
his speeches on the subject contain a number
of arguments that are not very creditable to
him.

Some of his remarks referred to a matter
which had been already a cause of great excite-
ment during Van Buren's administration, and
on which he had spoken more than once. This
was the destruction of the steamer Caroline by
the British during the abortive Canadian insur-
rection of 1837. Much sympathy had been
felt for the rebels by the Americans along the
border, and some of them had employed the
Caroline in conveying stores to the insurgents ;
and in revenge a party of British troops sur-
prised and destroyed her one night while she
was lying in an American port. This was a
gross and flagrant violation of our rights, and
was promptly resented by Van Buren, who had

BOUNDARY TROUBLES WITH ENGLAND. 271

done what be could to maintain order along the
border, and had been successful in his efforts.
Benton had supported the president in pre-
venting a breach of neutrality on our part, and
was fiercely indignant when the breach was
committed by the other side. Reparation was
demanded forthwith. The British government
at first made evasive replies. After a while a
very foolish personage named McLeod, a Brit-
ish subject, who boasted that he had taken part
in the affair, ventured into New York and was
promptly imprisoned by the state authorities.
His boastings, fortunately for him, proved to be
totally unfounded, and he was acquitted by the
jury before whom lie was taken, after a deten-
tion of several months in prison. But mean-
while the British government demanded his
release — adopting a very different tone with
Tyler and the Whigs from that which they had
been using towards Van Buren, who still could
conjure with Jackson's terrible name. The
United States agreed to release McLeod, but
New York refused to deliver him up ; and be-
fore the question was decided he was acquitted,
as said above. It was clearly wrong for a state
to interfere in a disagreement between the na-
tion and a foreign power ; and on the other
hand the federal authorities did not show as
much firmness in their dealings with England

272 THOMAS HART BENTON.

as they should have shown. Benton, true to
certain of his states-rights theories and in pur-
suance of his policy of antagonism to Great
Britain, warmly supported the attitude of New
York, alleging that the United States had no
right to interfere with her disposal of Mc-
Leod ; and asserting that while if the citizens
of one country committed an outrage upon an-
other it was necessary to apply to the sover-
eign for redress, yet that if the wrong-doers
came into the country which had been aggrieved
they might be seized and punished ; and he
exultingly referred to Jackson's conduct at the
time of the first Seminole War, when he hung
off-hand two British subjects whom he accused
of inciting the Indians against us. Great Britain
not making any protest. The Caroline matter
was finally settled in the Ashburton treaty, the
British making a formal but very guarded apol-
ogy for her destruction, — an apology which did
not satisfy Benton in the least.

It is little to Benton's credit, however, that,
while thus courting foreign wars, he yet opposed
the efforts of the Whigs to give us a better
navy. Our navy was then good of its kind, but
altogether too small. Benton's opposition to its
increase seems to have proceeded partly from
mere bitter partisanship, partly from sheer ig-
norance, and partly from the doctrinaire dread

{r.

i

BOUNDARY TROUBLES WITH ENGLAND. 273

of any kind of standing military or naval force,
which he had inherited, with a good many simi-
lar ideas, from the Jeffersonians.

He attacked the whole treaty, article by arti-
cle, when it came up for ratification in the Sen-
ate, making an extremely lengthy and elab-
orate speech, or rather set of speeches, against
it. Much of his objection, especially to the
part compromising the territorial claims of the
two governments, was well founded ; but much
was also factious and groundless. The most
important point of all that was in controversy,
the ownership of Oregon, was left unsettled ;
but, as will be shown farther on, this was wise.
He made this omission a base or pretext for the
charge that the treaty was gotten up in the
interests of the East, — although with frank
lack of logic he also opposed it because it sac-
rificed the interests of Maine, — and that it was
detrimental to the South and West ; and he did
his best to excite sectional feeling against it.
He also protested against the omission of all
reference to the impressment of American sail-
ors by British vessels ; and this was a valid
ground of opposition, — although Webster had
really settled the matter by writing a formal
note to the British government, in which he
practically gave official notice that any attempt
to revive the practice would be repelled by force
of arma,

274 THOMAS HART BENTON.

Benton occupied a much less tetiable position
when he came to the question of slavery, and
inveighed against the treaty because it did not
provide for the return of fugitive slaves, or of
slaves taken from American coasting vessels
when the latter happened to be obliged to put
into West Indian ports, and because it did con»
tain a provision that we ourselves should keep
in commission a squadron on the coast of Africa
to cooperate with the British in the suppression
of the slave-trade. Benton's object in attack-
ing the treaty on this point was to excite the
South to a degree that would make the senators
from that section refuse to join in ratifying it ;
but tlie attempt was a flat failure. It is hardly
to be supposed that he himself was as indignant
over this question as he pretended to be. He
must have realized that, so long as we had among
ourselves an institution so wholly barbarous
and out of date as slavery, just so long we
should have to expect foreign powers to treat us
rather cavalierly on that one point. Whatever
we might say among ourselves as to the rights
of property or the necessity of preserving the
Union by refraining from the disturbance of
slavery, it was certain that foreign nations
would place the manhood and liberty of the
slave above the vested interest of the master —
all the more readily because they were jealous

BOUNDARY TROUBLES WITH ENGLAND. 275

of the Union and anxious to see it break up,
and were naturally deliglited to take the side of
abstract justice and humanity, when to do so
was at the expense of outsiders and redounded
to their own credit, without causing them the
least pecuniary loss or personal inconvenience.
The attitude of slave-holders towards freedom
in the abstract was grotesque in its lack of logic ;
but the attitude of many other classes of men,
both abroad and at home, towards it was equally
full of a grimly unconscious humor. The south-
ern planters, who loudly sympathized with Kos-
suth and the Hungarians, were entirely uncon-
scious that their tyranny over their own black
bondsmen made their attacks upon Austria's
despotism absurd ; and Germans, who were
shocked at our holding the blacks in slavery,
could not think of freedom in their own country
without a shudder. On one night the Demo-
crats of the Northern States would hold a mass
meeting to further the cause of Irish freedom,
on the next night the same men would break
up another meeting held to help along the free-
ing of the negroes ; while the English aristoc-
racy held up its hands in horror at American
slavery and set its face like a flint against all
efforts to do Ireland tardy and incomplete jus-
tice.

Again, in his opposition to the extradition

276 THOMAS HART BENTON.

clause of the treaty, Benton was certainly
wrong. Nothing is clearer than that nations
ought to combine to prevent criminals from
escaping punishment merely by fleeing over an
imaginary line ; the crime is against all society,
and society should unite to punish it. Espe-
cially is there need of the most stringent ex-
tradition laws between countries whose people
have the same speech and legal system, as with
the United States and Great Britain. Indeed,
it is a pity that our extradition laws are not
more stringent. But Benton saw, or affected
to see, in the extradition clause, a menace to
political refugees, and based his opposition to it
mainly on this ground. He also quoted on his
side the inevitable Jefferson ; for Jefferson, or
rather the highly idealized conception of what
Jefferson had been, shared with the "demos
krateo principle " the honor of being one of
the twin fetiches to which Benton, in common
with most of his fellow-Democrats, especially
delighted to bow down.

But when he came to the parts of the treaty
that defined our northeastern boundary and so
much of our northwestern boundary as lay near
the Great Lakes, Benton occupied far more
defensible ground ; and the parts of his speech
referring to these questions were very strong in-
deed. He attempted to show that in the matter

I

BOUNDARY TROUBLES WITH ENGLAND. 277

of the Maine frontier we had surrendered very-
much more than there was any need of our do-
ing, and that the British claim was unfounded;
and there seems now to be good reason for
thinking him right, althougli it must be ad-
mitted that in agreeing to the original line in
earlier treaties the British had acted entirely
under a misapprehension as to where it would
go. Benton was also able to make a good
point against Webster for finally agreeing to
surrender so much of Maine's claim by showing
the opposition the latter had made, while in the
Senate, to a similar but less objectionable clause
in a treaty which Jackson's administration had
then been trying to get through. Again Web-
ster had, in defending the surrender of certain
of our claims along the boundary west of Lake
Superior, stated that the country was not very
valuable* as it was useless for agricultural pur-
poses ; and B^enton had taken him up sharply
on this point, saying that we wanted the land
anyhow, whether it produced corn and potatoes
or only furs and lumber. The amounts of ter-
ritory as to which our claims were compromised
were not very large compared to the extent of
the Pacific coast lands which were still left in
dispute ; and it was perhaps well that the
treaty was ratified ; but certainly there is much
to be said on Benton's side so far as his opposi-
tion to the proposed frontier was concerned.

278 THOMAS HART BENTON.

However, he was only able to rally eight
other senators to his support, and the treaty
went through the Senate triumphantly. It en-
countered an even more bitter opposition in
Parliament, where Palmerston headed a series
of furious attacks upon it, for reasons the pre-
cise opposite of those which Benton alleged,
arguing that England received much less, in-
stead of much more, than her due, and thereby
showing Webster's position in a very much
better light than that in which it would other-
wise have appeared. Eventually the British
government ratified the treaty.

The Ashburton treaty did not touch on the
Oregon matter at all ; nor was this dealt with
by Webster while he was secretarj^ of state.
But it came before the Senate at that time,
and later on Calhoun took it up, when filling
Webster's place in the cabinet, although a final
decision was not reached until during Polk's
presidency, Webster did not aj^preciate the
importance of Oregon in the least, and more-
over came from a section of the country that
was not inclined to insist on territorial expan-
sion at the hazard of a war, in which the mer-
chants of the sea-board would be the chief suf-
ferers. Calhoun, it is true, came from a pecu-
liarly militant and bellicose state, but on the
other hand from a section that was not very

BOUNDARY TROUBLES WITH ENGLAND. 279

anxious to see the free North acquire new terri-
tory. So it happened that neither of Tyler's
two great secretaries felt called upon to insist
too vehemently upon going to extremes in de-
fense of our rights, or supposed rights, along
the Pacific coast ; and though in the end the
balance was struck pretty evenly between our
claims and those of our neighbor, yet it is to be
regretted that we did not stand out stiffly for
the whole of our demand. Our title was cer-
tainly not perfect, but it was to the full as good
as, or better than. Great Britain's ; and it would
have been better in the end had we insisted
upon the whole territory being given to us, no
matter what price we had to pay.

The politico-social line of division between
the East and the West had been gradually
growing fainter as that between the North
and South grew deeper ; but on the Oregon
question it again became prominent. South-
eastern Democrats, like the Carolinian McDuf-
fie, spoke as slightingly of the value of Oregon,
and were as little inclined to risk a war for its
possession, as the most peace-loving Whigs of
New England ; while the intense western feel-
ing against giving up any of our rights on the
Pacific coast was best expressed by the two
senators from the slave state of Missouri. Ben-
ton was not restrained in his desire to add to

280 THOMAS HART BENTON.

the might of the Union by any fear of the pos-
sible future effect upon the political power of
the Slave States. Although a slave-holder and
the representative of slave-holders, he was fully
alive to the evils of slavery, though as yet not
seeing clearly how all-important a question it
had become. The preservation and extension of
the Union and obedience to the spirit of De-
mocracy were the chief articles of his political
creed, and to these he always subordinated all
others. When, in speaking of slavery, he made
use, as he sometimes did, of expressions that
were not far removed from those of men really
devoted to the slave interests, it was almost
always because he had some ulterior object in
view, or for factional ends; for unfortunately
his standard of political propriety was not suf-
ficiently high to prevent his trying to make
use of any weapon, good or bad, with which to
overturn his political foes. In protesting against
the Ashburton treaty, he outdid even such slav-
ery champions as Calhoun in the extravagance
of his ideas as to what we should demand of
foreign powers in reference to their treatment
of our " peculiar institution ; " but he seems
to have done this merely because thereby he
got an additional handle of attack against the
Whig measures. The same thing was true
earlier of his fulmination against Clay's pro*

BOUNDARY TROUBLES WITH ENGLAND. 281

posed Panama Congress ; and even before that,
in attacking Adams for his supposed part in the
treaty whereby we established the line of our
Spanish frontier, he dragged slavery into the
question, not, apparently, because he really par-
ticularly wished to see our slave territory ex-
tended, but because he thought that he might
use the slavery cry to excite in one other section
of the country a feeling as strong as that which
the West already felt in regard to territorial
expansion generally. Indeed, his whole conduct
throughout the Oregon controversy, especially
when taken in connection with the fact that
he stood out for Maine's frontier rights more
stoutly than the Maine representatives them-
selves, shows how free from sectional bias was
his way of looking at our geographical growth.
The territory along the Pacific coast lying
between California on the south and Alaska on
the north — " Oregon," as it was comprehen-
sively called — had been a source of dispute
for some time between the United States and
Great Britain. After some negotiations both
had agreed with Russia to recognize the line of
54.0 ^Q/ jj^g ^i^g southern boundary of the latter's
possessions ; and Mexico's undisputed posses-
sion of California gave an equally well marked
southern limit, at the forty - second parallel.
All between was in dispute. The British had

282 THOMAS HART BENTON.

trading posts at the mouth of the Cokimbia,
which they emphatically asserted to be theirs •,
we, on the other hand, claimed an absolutely
clear title up to the forty - ninth parallel, a
couple of hundred miles north of the mouth of
the Columbia, and asserted that for all the bal-
ance of the territory up to the Russian posses-
sions our title was at any rate better than that
of the British. In 1818 a treaty had been made
providing for the joint occupation of the terri-
tory by the two powers, as neither was willing
to give up its claim to the whole, or at the time
at all understood the value of the possession,
then entirely unpeopled. This treaty of joint
occupancy had remained in force ever since.
Under it the British had built great trading
stations, and used the whole country in the in-
terests of certain fur companies. The Amer-
icans, in spite of some vain efforts, were unable
to compete with them in this line ; but, what
was infinitely more important, had begun, even
prior to 1840, to establish actual settlers along
the banks of the rivers, some missionaries be-
ing the first to come in. As long, however, as
the territory remained sparsely settled, and the
communication with it chiefly by sea, the hold
of Great Britain gave promise of being the
stronger. But the aspect of affairs was totally
changed when in 1842 a huge caravan of over

BOUNDARY TROUBLES WITH ENGLAND. 283

a thousand Americans made the journey over-
land from the frontiers of Missouri, taking with
them their wives and their children, their flocks
and herds, carrying their long rifles on their
shoulders, and their axes and spades in the great
canvas - topped wagons. The next year, two
thousand more settlers of the same sort in their
turn crossed the vast plains, wound their way
among the RocSy Mountains through the pass
explored by Fremont, Benton's son-in-law, and
after suffering every kind of hardship and dan-
ger, and warding off the attacks of hostile
Indians, descended the western slope of the
great water-shed to join their fellows by the
banks of the Columbia. When American set-
tlers were once in actual possession of the dis-
puted territory, it became evident that the
period of Great Britain's undisputed sway was
over.

The government of the United States, mean-
while, was so far from helping these settlers
that it on the contrary rather threw obstacles in
their way. As usual with us, the individual ac-
tivity of the citizens themselves, who all acted
independently and with that peculiar self-reli-
ance that is the chief American characteristic,
outstripped the activity of their representatives,
who were obliged all to act together, and who
were therefore held back by each other, — our

284 THOMAS BART BENTON.

Constitution, while giving free scope for individ-
ual freedom, wisely providing such checks as to
make our governmental system eminently con-
servative in its workings. Tyler's administra-
tion did not wish to embroil itself with Eng-
land ; so it refused any aid to the settlers, and
declined to give them grants of land, as under
the joint occupancy treaty that would have
given England offense and cause for complaint.
But Benton and the other Westerners were
perfectly willing to offend England, if by so do-
ing they could help America to obtain Oregon,
and were too rash and headstrong to count the
cost of their actions. Accordingly, a bill was
introduced providing for the settlement of Ore-
gon, and giving each settler six hundred and
forty acres, and additional land if he had a fam-
ily ; so that every inducement was held out to
the emigrants, the West wanting to protect and
encourage them by all the means in its power.
The laws and jurisdiction of the Territory of
Iowa were to be extended to all the settlers on
the Pacific coast, who hitherto had governed
themselves merely by a system of mutual agree-
ments.

The bill was, of course, strongly opposed, es-
pecially on account of the clause giving land to
the settlers. It passed the Senate by a close
vote, but failed in the House. Naturally Ben-

BOUNDARY TROUBLES WITH ENGLAND. 285

ton was one of its chief supporters, and s[)oke at
length in its favor. He seized the kernel of the
matter when, m advocating the granting of land,
he spoke of immigration as '" the only thing
which can save the country from the British,
acting through their powerful agent, the Hud-
son's Bay Company." He then blew a lusty
note of defiance to Great Britain herself : —

I think she will take offense, do what we mav in
relation to this territory. She wants it herself, and
means to quarrel for it, if she does not fight for it.
... I grant that she will take offense, but that is
not the question with me. Has she a right to take
offense ? That is my question ! And this being de-
cided in the negative, 1 neither fear nor calculate con-
sequences. . . . Courage will keep her off, fear will
bring her upon us. The assertion of our rights will
command her respect ; the fear to assert them will
bring us her contempt. . . . Neither nations nor in-
dividuals ever escaped danger by fearing it. They
must face it and defy it. An abandonment of a right
for fear of bringing on an attack, instead of keeping
it off, will inevitably bring on the outrage that is
dreaded.

He was right enough in his disposition to re-
sent the hectoring spirit which, at that time,
characterized Great Britain's foreign policy ,*
but he was all wrong in condemning delay, and
stating that if things were left as they were
time would work against us, and not for us.

286 THOMAS HART BENTON.

In this respect Calhoun, who opposed the bill,
was much wiser. He advocated a policy of
*' masterly inactivity," foreseeing that time was
everything to us, inasmuch as the land was sure
in the end to belong to that nation whose peo-
ple had settled in it, and we alone were able to
furnish a constantly increasing stream of immi-
grants. Later on, however, Calhoun abandoned
this policy, probably mainly influenced by fear
of the extension of free territory, and consented
to a compromise with Great Britain. The true
course to have pursued would have been to have
combined the ideas of both Benton and Calhoun,
and to have gone farther than either; that is, we
should have allowed the question to remain un-
settled as long as was possible, because every
year saw an increasing American population in
the coveted lands, and rendered the ultimate
decision surer to be for us. When it was im-
possible to postpone the question longer, we
should have insisted upon its being settled
entirely in our favor, no matter at what cost.
The unsuccessful attempts, made by Benton and
his supporters, to persuade the Senate to pass a
resolution, requiring that notice of the termina-
tion of the joint occupancy treaty should forth-
with be given, were certainly ill-advised.

However, even Benton was not willing to go
to the length to which certain Western men

BaUNDARY TROUBLES WITH ENGLAND. 287

went, who insisted upon all or nothing. He had
become alarmed and angry over the intrigue for
the adniission of Texas and the proposed for-
cible taking away of Mexican territory. The
Northwestern Democrats wanted all Texas and
all Oregon ; the Southeastern ones wished all
the former and part of the latter. Benton
then concluded that it would be best to take
part of each ; for, although no friend to compro-
mises, yet he was unwilling to jeopardize the
safety of the Union as it was by seeking to make
it still larger. Accordingly, he sympathized
with the effort made by Calhoun while secretary
of state to get the British to accept the line of
49° as the frontier ; but the British government
then rejected this proposition. In 1844 the
Democrats made their campaign upon the issue
of " fifty-four forty or fight ;" and Polk, when
elected, felt obliged to insist upon this campaign
boundary. To this, however. Great Britain nat-
urally would not consent ; it was, indeed, idle
to expect her to do so, unless things should be
kept as they were until a fairly large American
population had grown up along the Pacific coast,
and had thus put her in a position where she
could hardly do anything else. Polk's admin-
istration was neither capable nor warlike, how-
ever well disposed to bluster ; and the secretary
of state, the timid, shifty, and selfish politician,

288 THOMAS EART BENTON.

Buchanan, naturally fond of facing both ways,
was the last man to wish to force a quarrel on a
high - spirited and determined antagonist like
England. Accordingly, he made up his mind
to back down and try for the line of 49°, as pro-
posed by Calhoun, when in Tyler's cabinet ; and
the English, for all their affected indifference,
had been so much impressed by the warlike
demonstrations in the United States, that they
in turn were delighted, singing in a much lower
key than before the '* fifty-four forty " cry had
been raised ; accordingly they withdrew their
former pretensions to the Columbia River and
accepted the offered compromise. Now, how-
ever, came the question of getting the treaty
through the Senate ; and Buchanan sounded
Benton, to see if he would undertake this task.
Benton, worried over the Texas matter, was
willing to recede somewhat from the very high
fi^round he had taken, — although, of course, he
insisted that he had been perfectly consistent
throughout, and that the 49th parallel was the
line he had all along been striving for. Under
liis lead the proposal for a treaty on the basis
indicated was carried through the Senate, and
the line in consequence ultimately became our
frontier, in spite of the frantic opposition of
the Northwestern Democrats, the latter hurling
every sort of charge of bad faith and treachery

BOUNDARY TROUBLES WITH ENGLAND. 289

at their Southern associates, who had joined with
the Whigs in defeating them, lien ton's speech
in support of the proposal was pitched much
lower than had been his previous ones ; and, a
little forgetful of some of his own remarks, he
was especially severe upon those members who
denounced England and held up a picture of her
real or supposed designs to excite and frighten
the people into needless opposition to her.

In its immediate effects the adoption of the
49th parallel as the dividing line between the
two countries was excellent, and entailed no loss
of dignity on either. Yet, as there was no par-
ticular reason why we should show any gener-
osity in our diplomatic dealings with England,
it may well be questioned whether it would not
have been better to have left things as they were
until we could have taken all. Wars are, of
course, as a rule to be avoided ; but they are
far better than certain kinds of peace. Every
war in which we have been engaged, except
the one with Mexico, has been justifiable in its
origin ; and each one, without any exception
whatever, has left us better off, taking both
moral and material considerations into account,
than we should have been if we had not waged
it.

19

CHAPTER XIII.

the abolitionists dance to the slave
barons' piping.

f In 1844 the Whig candidate for the Presi-
dency, Henry Clay, was defeated by a Mr. Polk,
the nominee of the Democracy. The majorities
in several of the states were very small ; this
was the case, for example in New York, the
change in whose electoral vote would have also
changed the entire result.

yjp to 1860 there were very few political con-
tests in which the dividing lines between right
and wrong so nearly coincided with those drawn
between the two opposing parties as in that of
1844^ The Democrats favored the annexation of
Texas, and the addition of new slave territory to
the Union ; the Whigs did not. Almost every
good element in the country stoocTbehind Clay ;
the vast majority of intelligent, high - minded,
upright men supported him. Polk was backed
by rabid Southern fire-eaters and slavery exten-
sionists, who had deified, negro bondage and ex-
alted it beyond the Union, the Constitution, and

ABOLITIONISTS AND SLAVE BARONS. 291

ever^^thing else ; by the almost solid foreign
vote, still unfit for the duties of American
citizenship ; by the vicious and criminal classes
in all the great cities of the North and in New
Orleans ; by the corrupt politicians, who found
ignorance and viciousness tools ready forged to
their hands, wherewith to perpetrate the gi-
gantic frauds without which the election would
have been lost ; and, lastly, he was also backed
indirectly but most powerfully by the political
Abolitionists.

These Abolitionists had formed themselves
into the Liberty party, and ran Birney for
president ; and though they polled but little
over sixty thousand votes, yet as these were
drawn almost entirely from the ranks of Clay's
supporters, they were primarily responsible for
his defeat ; for the defections were sufficiently
large to turn the scale in certain pivotal and
closely contested states, notably New York.
Their action in this case was wholly evil, alike
in its immediate and its remote results ; they
simply played into the hands of the extreme
slavery men like Calhoun, and became, for the
time being, the willing accomplices of the latter.
Yet they would have accomplished nothing had
it not been for the frauds and outrages perpe-
trated by the gangs of native and foreign-born
ruffians in the great cities, under tlie leadership
of such brutal rowdies as Isaiah Rynders.

292 THOMAS HART BENTON.

These three men, Calhoun, Birney, and Isaiah
Rynders, may be taken as types of the classes
that were chiefly instrumental in the election of
Polk, and that must, therefore, bear the respon-
sibility for all the evils attendant thereon, in-
cluding among them the bloody and unrighteous
War with Mexico. ^ With the purpose of advan-
( cing the cause of abstract right, but with the re-
sult of sacrificing all that was best, most honest,
and most high-principled in national politics,
,,the Abolitionists joined hands with Northern
I roughs and Southern slavocrats to elect the man
|\who was, excepting Tyler, the very smallest of
[ kthe line of small presidents who came in be-
J^ tween Jackson and Lincoln.]

Owing to a variety of causes, the Abolitionists
have received an immense amount of hysterical
praise, which they do not deserve, and have
been credited with deeds done by other men,
whom they in reality hampered and opposed
rather than aided. After 1840 the professed
Abolitionists formed but a small and compara-
tively unimportant portion of the forces that
were working towards the restriction and ulti-
mate destruction of slaverv ; and much of what
they did was positively harmful to the cause for
which they were fighting. Those of their num-
ber who considered the Constitution as a league
with death and hell, and who therefore advocated

ABOLITIONISTS AND SLAVE BARONS. 293

a dissolution of tlie Union, acted as rationally
as would anti-polyganiists nowadays if, to show
their disapproval of Mormonism, they should
advocate that Utah should be allowed to form
a separate nation. The only hope of ultimately
suppressing slaver}'' lay in the preservation of
the Union, and every Abolitionist who argued
or signed a petition for its dissolution was doing
as much to perpetuate the evil he complained
of as if he had been a slave-holder. The Lib-
erty party, in running Birney, simply commit-
ted a political crime, evil in almost all its con-
sequences ; they in no sense paved the way for
the Republican party, or helped forward the
anti-slavery cause, or hurt the existing organi-
zations. Their effect on the Democracy was
nil ; and all they were able to accomplish with
the Whigs was to make them put forward for
tlie ensuing campaign a slave-holder from Lou-
isiana, with whom they were successful. Such
were the remote results of their conduct ; the
immediate evils they produced have already
been alluded to. They bore considerable re-
semblance — except that, after all, they really
did have a principle to contend for — to the
political prohibitionists of the present day, who
go into the third party organizations, and are,
not even excepting the saloon-keepers them-
selves, the most efficient allies on whom intem-
perance and the liquor traffic can count.

294 THOMAS HART BENTON.

Anti-slavery men like Giddings, who sup-
ported Clay, were doing a thousand-fold more
effective work for the cause they had at heart
than all the voters who supported Birney; or,
to speak more accurately, they were doing all
they could to advance the cause, and the others
were doing all they could to hold it back. Lin-
coln in 1860 occupied more nearly the ground
held by Clay than that held by Birney ; and
the men who supported the latter in 1844 were
the prototypes of those who wished to oppose
Lincoln in 1860, and only worked less hard be-
cause they had less chance. The ultra AboH-
tionists discarded expediency, and claimed to
act for abstract right, on principle, no matter
what the results might be ; in consequence they
accomplished very little, and that as much for
harm as for good, until they ate their words,
went counter to their previous course, thereby
acknowledging it to be bad, and supported in
the Republican party the men and principles
they had so fiercely condemned. The Liberty
party was not in any sense the precursor of the
Republican party, which was based as much on
expediency as on abstract right, and was there-
fore able to accomplish good instead of harm.
To say that the extreme Abolitionists triumphed
in Republican success and were causes of it, is
as absurd as it would be to call prohibitionists

ABOLITIONISTS AND SLAVE BARONS. 295

successful if, after countless futile efforts totally
to prohibit the liquor traffic, and after savage
denunciation of those who try to regulate it,
they should then turn round and form a com-
paratively insignificant portion of a victorious
high-license party.

Many people in speaking of the Abolitionists
apparently forget that the national government,
even under Republican rule, would never have
meddled with slavery in the various states un-
less as a war measure, made necessary by the
rebellion into which the South was led by a
variety of causes, of which slavery was chief,
but among which there were others that were
also prominent ; such as the separatist spirit of
certain of the communities and the unscrupulous,
treacherous ambition of such men as Davis,
Floyd, and the rest. The Abolitionists' polit-
ical organizations, such as the Liberty party,
generally produced very little effect either way,
and were scarcely thought of during the con-
tests waged for freedom in Congress. The men
who took a great and effective part in the fight
against slavery were the men who remained
within their respective parties ; like the Demo-
crats Benton and Wilmot, or the Whigs Seward
and Stevens. When a new party with more
clearly defined principles was formed, they, for
the most part, went into it ; but, like all other

296 THOMAS HART BENTON.

men who have ever had a really great influence,
whether for good or bad, on American politics,
they did not act independently of parties, but
on the contrary kept within party lines, — al-
though, of course, none of them were mere blind
and unreasoning partisans.

The plea that slavery was a question of prin-
ciple, on which no compromise could be accepted,
might have been made and could still be made
on twenty other points, — woman suffrage, for
instance. Of course, to give women their just
rights does not by any means imply that they
should necessarily be allowed to vote, any more
than the bestowal of the rights of citizenship
upon blacks and aliens must of necessity carry
with it the same^ivilege. But there were until
lately, and in some states there are now, laws on
the statute - book in reference to women that
are in principle as unjust, and that are quite as
much the remnants of archaic barbarism as was
the old slave code ; and though it is true that
they do not work anything like the evil of
the latter, they yet certainly work evil enough.
The same laws that in one Southern state gave
a master a right to whip a slave also allowed
him to whip his wife, provided he used a stick
no tliicker than his little finger ; the legal per-
mission to do the latter was even more outrage^
ous than that to do the former, yet no one con*

ABOLITIONISTS AND SLAVE BARONS. 297

sidered it a ground for wishing a dissolution of
the Union or for declaring against the existing
parties. The folly of voting the Liberty ticket
in 1844 differed in degree, but not at all in kind,
from the folly of voting the Woman Suffrage
ticket in 1884.

The intrigue for the annexation of Texas,
and for thereby extending thtj slave territory
of the Union, had taken shape towards the
close of Tyler's term of office, while Calhoun
was secretary of state. Benton, as an aggres-
sive Western man, desirous of seeing our ter-
ritorial possessions extended in any direction,
north or south, always hoped that in the end
Texas might be admitted into the Union ; but
he disliked seeing any premature steps taken,
and was no party to the scheme of forcing
an immediate annexation in the interests of
slavery. Such immediate annexation was cer-
tain, among other things, to bring us into grave
difficulties not only with Mexico, but also with
England, which was strongly inclined to take
much interest of a practical sort in the fate of
Texas, and would, of course, have done all it
could to bring about the abolition of slavery
in that state. The Southerners, desirous of
increasing the slave domain, and always in a
state of fierce alarm over the proximity of any
free state that might excite a servile insurrec-

298 THOMAS HART BENTON.

tion, were impatient to add the Lone Star Re-
public of the Rio Grande to the number of their
states; the Southwesterners fell in with them,
influenced, though less strongly, by the same
motives, and also by the lust for new lands and
by race hatred towards the Mexicans and tra-
ditional jealousy of Great Britain ; and these
latter motives induced many Northwesterners
to follow suit. By a judicious harping on all
these strings Jackson himself, whose name was
still a mighty power among the masses, was in-
duced to write a letter favoring instant and
prompt annexation.

This letter was really procured for political
purposes. Tyler had completely identified him-
self with the Democracy, and especially with
its extreme separatist wing, to which Calhoun
also belonged, and which had grown so as to
be already almost able to take the reins. The
separatist chiefs were intriguing for the presi-
dencj^ and were using annexation as a cry that
would help them ; and, failing in this attempt,
many of the leaders were willing to break up
the Union, and turn the Southern States, toge-
ther with Texas, into a slave - holding confed-
eracy. After Benton, the great champion of
the old-style Union Democrats was Van Buren,
who was opposed to immediate annexation,
sharing the feeling that prevailed throughout

ABOLITIONISTS AND SLAVE BARONS. 299

the Northeast generally ; although in certain
circles all through the country there were men
at work in its favor, largely as a mere matter
of jobbery and from base motives, on account
of speculations in Texan land and scrip, into
which various capitalists and adventurers had
gone rather extensively. Jackson, though a
Southerner, warmly favored Van Buren, and'
was bitterly opposed to separatists ; but the
latter, by cunningly working on his feelings,
without showing their own hands, persuaded
him to write the letter mentioned, and promptly
used it to destroy the chances of Van Buren,
who was the man they chiefly feared ; and
though Jackson, at last roused to what was
going on, immediately announced himself as in
favor of Van Buren's candidacy, it was too late
to undo the mischief.

Benton showed on this, as on many other oc-
casions, much keener political ideas than his
great political chief. He was approached by a
politician, who himself was either one of those
concerned in the presidential intrigues, or else
one of their dupes, and who tried to win him
over to take the lead on their side, compliment-
ing him upon his former services to the cause
of territorial expansion towards the southwest.
Ordinarily the great Missourian was suscepti-
ble enough to such flattery ; but on this occa-

300 THOMAS HART BENTON,

sion, preoccupied with the idea of an intrigue
for the presidency, and indignant that there
should be an effort made to implicate him in
it, especially as it was mixed up with schemes
of stock-jobbing and of disloyalty to the Union,
he took fire at once, and answered with hot
indignation, in words afterwards highly re-
sented by his questioner, " that it was on the
part of some an intrigue for the presidency,
and a plot to dissolve the Union ; on the part of
others, a Texas scrip and land speculation ; and
that he was against it." The answer was
published in the papers, and brought about a
total break between Benton and the annexation
party.

He was now thoroughly on the alert, and
actively opposed at all points the schemes of
those whom he regarded as concerned in or in-
stigating th-e intrigue. He commented harshly
on Tyler's annual message, which made a strong
plea for annexation, even at the cost of a war
both with Great Britain and Mexico; also on
Calhoun's letter to Lord Aberdeen, which was
certainly a remarkable diplomatic document, —
being a thesis on slavery and the benefits re-
sulting from it. Tyler's object was to prepare
the way for a secret treaty, which should secure
the desired object. Benton, in the course of
some severe strictures on bis acts, said, very

ABOLITIONISTS AND SLAVE BARONS. 301

truly, that it was evidently the intention to
keep the whole matter as secret as possible
until the treaty was concluded, " and then to
force its adoption for the purpose of increasing
the area of slave territory, or to make its rejec-
tion a cause for the secession of the Southern
States ; and in either event and in all cases to
make the question of annexation a controlling
one in the nomination of presidential candi-
dates, and also in the election itself."

When the treaty proposed by the administra-
tion was rejected, and when it became evident
that neither Tyler nor Calhoun, the two most
prominent champions of the extreme separa-
tists, had any chance for the Democratic nom-
ination, the disunion side of the intrigue was
brought to the front in many of the Southern
States, beginning of course with South Caro-
lina. A movement was made for a convention
of the Southern States, to be held in the inter-
est of the scheme ; the key-note being struck in
the cry of " Texas or disunion ! " But this con-
vention was given up, on account of the strong
opposition it excited in the so-called " Border
States," — an opposition largely stirred up and
led by Benton. Once more the haughty slave
leaders of the Southeast had found that in the
Missouri Senator they had an opponent whose
fearlessness quite equaled their own, and whose

302 THOMAS HART BENTON.

stubborn temper and strength of purpose made
him at least a match for themselves, in spite of
all their dash and fiery impetuosity. It must
have sounded strange, indeed, to Northern ears,
accustomed to the harsh railings and insolent
threats of the South Carolina senators, to hear
one of the latter complaining that Benton's tone
in the debate was arrogant, overbearing, and
dictatorial towards those who were opposed to
him. This same Senator, McDufiie, had been
speaking of the proposed Southern meeting at
Nashville ; and Benton warned him that such
a meeting would never take place, and that he
had mistaken the temper of the Tennesseans ;
and also reminded him that General Jackson
was still alive, and that the South Carolinians
in partioular must needs be careful if they
hoped to agree with his followers, whose name
was still legion, because he would certainly
take the same position towards a disunion
movement in the interests of slavery that he
had already taken towards a nullification move-
ment in the interests of free trade. "Preser-
vation of the federal Union is as strong in the
old Roman's heart now as ever ; and while, as
a Christian, he forgives all that is past (if it
were past), yet no old tricks under new names!
Texas disunion will be to him the same as
tariff disunion; and if he detects a Texas dis-

ABOLITIONISTS AND SLAVE BARONS. 303

unionist nestling into his bed, I say again : Woe
unto the luckless wight ! " Boldly and forcibly
he went on to paint the real motives of the pro-
moters of the scheme, and the real character of
the scheme itself ; stating that, though mixed
up with various speculative enterprises and
with other intrigues, yet disunion was at the
bottom of it all, and that already the cry had
become, " Texas without the Union, rather
than the Union without Texas ! " " Under the
pretext of getting Texas into the Union the
scheme is to get the South out of it. A
Southern Confederacy stretching from the At-
lantic to the Californias. ... is the cherished
vision of disappointed ambition." He bitterly
condemned secession, as simply disunion begat
by nullification, and went on to speak of his
own attitude in apparently opposing the admis-
sion of Texas, which he had always desired to
see become a part of the Union, and which he
had always insisted rightfully belonged to us,
and to have been given away by Monroe's treaty
with Spain. " All that is intended and foreseen.
The intrigue for the presidency was the first act
in the drama ; the dissolution of the Union the
second. And I, who hate intrigue and love the
Union, can only speak of the intriguers and dis-
unionists with warmth and indignation. The
oldest advocate for the recovery of Texas, I

804 THOMAS HART BENTON.

must be allowed to speak in just terms of the
criminal politicians who prostituted the ques-
tion of its recovery to their own base purposes,
and delayed its success by degrading and dis-
gracing it. A Western man, and coming from
a state more than any other interested in the
recovery of this country, so unaccountably
thrown away by the treaty of 1819, I must be
allowed to feel indignant at seeing Atlantic
politicians seizing upon it, and making it a sec-
tional question for the purpv^^es of ambition
and disunion. I have spoken warmly of these
plotters and intriguers ; but I have not per-
mitted their conduct to alter my own, or to re-
lax my zeal for the recovery of the sacrificed
country. I have helped to reject the disunion
treaty ; and that obstacle being removed, I have
brought in the bill which will insure the recov-
ery of Texas, with peace and honor, and with
the Union."

It is important to remember, in speaking of
his afterwards voting to admit Texas, that this
was what he had all along favored, and that he
now opposed it only on account of special cir-
cumstances. In both cases he was right ; for,
slavery or no slavery, it would have been a
most unfortunate thing for us, and still worse
for the Texans, if the latter had been allowed
to develop into an independent nation. Benton

ABOLITIONISTS AND SLAVE BARONS. 305

deserves the greatest credit for the way in
which he withstood the ignorant popular feel-
ing of his own section in regard to Tyler's pro-
posed treaty ; and not only did he show himself
able to withstand pressure from behind him,
but also prompt in resenting threats made by
outsiders. When McDuffie told him that the
remembrance of his attitude on the bill would,
to his harm, meet him on some future day, like
the ghost that appeared to Brutus at Philippi,
he answered : —

I can promise the ghost aud his backers that if the
fight goes against me at this new Philippi, with which
I am threatened, and the enemies of the American
Union triumph over me as the enemies of Roman lib-
erty triumphed over Brutus and Cassius, I shall not
fall upon my sword, as Brutus did, though Cassius be
killed, and run it through my own body ; but I shall
save it and save myself for another day and another
use, — for the day when the battle of the disunion of
these states is to be fought, not with words but with
iron, and for the hearts of the traitors who appear in
arms against their country.

Such a stern, defiant, almost prophetic warn-
ing did more to help the Union cause than vol-
umes of elaborate constitutional argument, and
it would have been well for the Northern States
had they possessed men as capable of uttering
it as was the iron Westerner. Benton always

20

306 THOMAS HART BENTON.

showed at bis best when the honor or integrity
of the nation was menaced, whether by foes from
without or by foes from within. On such occa-
sions his metal always rang true. When there
was any question of breaking faith with the
Union, or of treachery towards it, his figure al-
ways loomed up as one of the chief in the ranks
of its defenders ; and his follies and weaknesses
sink out of sight when we think of the tremen-
dous debt which the country owes him for his
sorely tried and unswerving loyalty.

The treaty alluded to by Benton in his speech
against the abortive secession movement was
the one made with Texas while Calhoun was
secretary of "state, and submitted to the Senate
by Tyler, with a message as extraordinary as
some of his secretary's utterances. The treaty
was preposterously unjust and iniquitous. It
provided for the annexation of Texas, and also
of a very large portion of Mexico, to which
Texas had no possible title, and this without
consulting Mexico in any way whatever ; Cal-
houn advancing the plea that it was necessary
to act immediately on account of the danger
that Texas was in of falling under the control of
England, and therefore having slavery abolished
within its borders ; while Tyler blandly an-
nounced that we had acquired title to the ceded
territory — which belonged to one power and

ABOLITIONISTS- AND SLAVE BARONS. 307

was ceded to us by another — through his sig-
nature to the treaty, and that, pending its rati-
fication by the Senate, he had dispatched troops
to the scene of action to protect the ceded land
" from invasion," — the territory to be thus
protected from Mexican invasion being then
and always having been part and parcel of
Mexico.

Benton opposed the ratification of the treaty
in a very strong speech, during which he merci-
lessly assailed both Tyler and Calhoun. The
conduct of the former he dismissed with the con-
temptuous remark that he had committed *' a
caper about equal to the mad freaks with which
the unfortunate Emperor Paul, of Russia, was
accustomed to astonish Europe ; " and roughly
warned him to be careful how he tried to imi-
tate Jackson's methods, because in heroic imi-
tations there was no middle ground, and if he
failed to fill the role of hero he would then per-
force find himself playing that of harlequin.
Calhoun received more attention, for he was far
more worthy of a foeman's steel than was his
nominal superior, and Benton exposed at length
the willful exaggeration and the perversion of
the truth of which the Carolinian had been
guilty in trying to raise the alarm of English
interference in Texas, for the purpose of excus-
ing the haste with which the treaty was carried
through.

308 THOMAS HART BENTON.

He showed at length the outrage we should
inflict upon Mexico by seizing ''two thousand
miles of her territory, without a word of expla-
nation with her, and by virtue of a treaty with
Texas to which she was no party ; " and he
conclusively proved, making use of his own
extensive acquaintance with history, especially
American history, that the old Texas, the only
territory that the Texans themselves or we
could claim with any shadow of right, made
but a fraction of the territory now " ceded " to
us. He laughed at the idea of calling the ter-
ritory Texas, and speaking of its forcible cut-
ting off as re-annexation, '' Humboldt calls it
New Mexico, Chihuahua, Coahuila and Nuevo
Santander ; and the civilized world may qualify
this re-annexation by some odious and terrible
epithet . . . robbery ; " then he went on to draw
a biting contrast between our treatment of Mex-
ico and our treatment of England. " Would
we take two thousand miles of Canada in the
same way ? I presume not. And why not ?
Why not treat Great Britain and Mexico alike?
Why not march up to 'fifty -four forty ' as cour-
ageously as we march upon the Rio Grande ?
Because Great Britain is powerful and Mexico
weak, — a reason which may fail in policy as
much as in morals." Also he ridiculed the flurry
of fear into which the Southern slave-holders

ABOLITIONISTS AND SLAVE BARONS. 309

affected to be cast by the dread of England's
hostility to slavery, when they had just acqui-
esced in making a treaty with her by which we
bound ourselves to help to put down the slave-
trade. He then stated his own position, show-
ing why he wished us to have the original
Texan lands, if we could get them honorably,
and without robbing Mexico of new territory;
and at the same time sneered at Calhoun and
Tyler because they had formerly favored the
Monroe treaty, by which we abandoned our
claims to them : —

We want Texas, that is to say, the Texas of La
Salle ; and we want it for great natural reasons,
obvious as day, and permanent as nature. We want
it because it is geographically appurtenant to our
division of North America, essential to our political,
commercial, and social system, and because it would
be detrimental and injurious to us to have it fall into
the hands or sink under the domination of any for-
eign power. For these reasons I was against sacrific-
ing the country when it was thrown away, — and
thrown away by those who are now so suddenly pos-
sessed of a fury to get it back. For these reasons I
am for getting it back whenever it can be done with
peace and honor, or even at the price of just war
against any intrusive European power ; but I am
against all disguise and artifice, — against all pre-
texts, — and especially against weak and groundless
pretexts, discreditable to ourselves and offensive to

e

olO THOMAS HART BENTON.

others, too thin and shallow not to be seen through
by every beholder, and merely invented to cover un-
v^^orthy purposes.

The treaty was rejected by an overwhelming
vote, although Buchanan led a few of his time-
serving comrades from the North to the sup-
port of the extreme Southern element. Benton
then tried, but failed, to get through a bill pro-
viding for a joint agreement between Mexico,
Texas, and the United States to settle definitely
all boundary questions. Meanwhile the presi-
dential election occurred, with the result already
mentioned. The separatist and annexationist
Democrats, the extreme slavery wing of the.
party, defeated Van Buren and nominated Polk,
who was their man ; the Whigs nominated Clay,
who was heartily opposed to all the schemes of
the disunion and extreme slavery men, and who,
if elected, while he might very properly have
consented to the admission of Texas with its
old boundaries, would never have brought on a
war nor have attempted to add a vast extent of
new slave territory to the Union. Clay would
have been elected, and the slavery disunionists
defeated, if in the very nick of time the Aboli-
tionists had not stepped in to support the latter,
and by their blindness in supporting Birney
given the triumph to their own most bitter op-
ponents. Then the Abolitionists, having played

ABOLITIONISTS AND SLAVE BARONS. 311

their only card, and played it badly, bad to sit
still and see what evil their acts had produced ;
they had accomplished just as much as men
generally do accomplish when they dance to the
tune that their worst foes play.

Polk's election gave an enormous impulse to
the annexation movement, and made it doubly
and trebly difficult for any one to withstand it.
The extreme disunion and slavery men, of course,
hated Benton, himself a Southwesterner from a
slave-holding state, with peculiar venom, on ac-
count of his attitude, very justly regarding him
as the main obstacle in their path ; and the din
and outcry raised against all who opposed the
schemes of the intriguers was directed with
especial fury against the Missourian. He was
accused of being allied to the Whigs, of wishing
to break up the Democracy, and of many other
things. Indeed, Benton's own people were very
largely against him, and it must always be re-
membered that whereas Northeastern statesmen
were certain to be on the popular side in taking
a stand against the extreme pro -slavery men^
Benton's position was often just the reverse.
With them it was politic to do right ; with
him it was not ; and for this reason the praise
awarded the latter should be beyond measure
greater than that awarded to the former.

Still, there can be little question that he was

312 THOMAS HART BENTON.

somewhat, even although only slightly, influ-
enced by the storm of which he had to bear
the brunt ; indeed, he would have been more
than human if he had not been ; and probably
this outside pressure was one among the causes
that induced him to accept a compromise in the
matter, which took effect just before Polk was
inaugurated. The House of Representatives had
passed a resolution giving the consent of Con-
gress to the admission of Texas as a state, and
allowing it the privilege of forming four addi-
tional states out of its territory, whenever it
should see fit. The line of the Missouri Compro-
mise, 36° 30', was run through this new terri-
tory, slavery being prohibited in the lands lying
north of it, and permissible or not, according to
the will of the state seeking admission, in those
lying south of it. Benton meanwhile had intro-
duced a bill merely providing that negotiations
should be entered into with Texas for its admis-
sion, the proposed treaty or articles of agreement
to be submitted to the Senate or to Congress.
He thereby kept the control in the hands of the
legislature, which the joint resolution did not ;
and moreover, as he said in his speech, he wished
to provide for due consideration being shown
Mexico in the arrangement of the boundary, and
for the matter being settled by commissioners.
Neither resolution nor bill could get through

ABOLITIONISTS AND SLAVE BARONS. 313

by itself ; and accordingly it was proposed to
combine both into one measure, leaving the
president free to choose either plan. To this
proposition Benton finally consented, it being
understood that, as only three days of Tyler's
term remained, the execution of the act would
be left to the in-coniing president, and that the
latter would adopt Benton's plans. The friends
of the admission of Texas assured the doubtful
voters that such would be the case. Polk him-
self gave full assurance that he would appoint
a commission, as provided by Benton's bill, if
passed, with the House resolution as an alterna-
tive ; and McDuffie, Calhoun's friend, and the
senator from South Carolina, announced with-
out reserve that Calhoun — for Tyler need not
be considered in the matter, after it had been
committed to the great nullifier — would not
have the " audacity " to try to take the settle-
ment of the question away from the president,
who was to be inaugurated on the fourth of
March. On the strength of these assurances,
which, if made good, would, of course, have ren-
dered the " alternative " a merely nominal one,
Benton supported the measure, which was then
passed. Contrary to all expectation, Calhoun
promptly acted upon the legislative clause, and
Polk made no effort to undo what the former
had done. This caused intense chagrin and

814 THOMAS HART BENTON.

anger to the Bentonians ; but they should cer-
tainly have taken such a contingency into ac-
count, and though they might with much show
of reason say that they had been tricked into
acting as they had done, yet it is probable that
the immense pressure from behind had made
BentoiT! too eager to follow any way he could
find that would take him out of the position
into which his conscience had led him. No
amount of pressure would have made him de-
liberately sanction a wrong ; but it did render
him a little less wary in watching to see that
the right was not infringed upon. It was
most natural that he should be anxious to find
a common ground for himself and his constit-
uents to stand on ; but it is to be regretted that
this anxiety to find a common ground should
have made him willing to trust blindly to vague
pledges and promises, which he ought to have
known would not be held in the least binding
by those on whose behalf they were supposed
to be made.

Acting under this compromise measure Texas
was admitted, and the foundation for our war
with Mexico was laid. Calhoun, under whom
this was done, nevertheless sincerely regretted
the war itself, and freely condemned Polk's ad-
ministration for bringing it on ; his own posi-
tion being that he desired to obtain without a

ABOLITIONISTS AND SLAVE BARONS. 315

war what it was impossible we should get except
at the cost of one. Benton, who had all along
consistently opposed doing a wrong to Mexico,
attacked the whole war party, and in a strong
and bitter speech accused Calhoun of being
the cause of the contest ; showing plainly that,
whatever the ex-secretary of state might say
in regard to the acts immediately precipitating
the conflict, he himself was responsible as being
in truth their original cause. While stating his
conviction, however, that Calhoun was the real
author of the war, Benton added that he did not
believe that war was his object, although an in-
evitable incident of the course he had pursued.
Although heartily opposed to the war in its
origin, Benton very properly believed in prose-
cuting it with the utmost vigor when once we
were fairly in ; and it was mainly owing to him
that the proposed policy of a " masterly inactiv-
ity" was abandoned, and the scheme of push-
ing straight for the city of Mexico adopted in
its stead. Indeed, it was actually proposed to
make him lieutenant-general, and therefore the
commander-in-chief of our forces in Mexico ;
but this was defeated in the Senate, very for-
tunately, as it would have been a great outrage
upon Scott, Taylor, and every other soldier with
real military training. It seems extraordinary
that Benton himself should not have seen the
absurdity and wrong of such a proposition.

316 THOMAS HART BENTON.

The wonderful hardihood and daring shown
in the various expeditions against Mexico, espe-
cially in those whereby her northwest territory
was wrested from her, naturally called forth
all Benton's sympathy ; and one of his best
speeches was that made to welcome Doniphan's
victorious volunteers after their return home
from their famous march to Chihuahua.

CHAPTER XIV.

SLAVERY IN THE NEW TEKRITOKIES.

Hardly was Polk elected before it became
evident to Benton and the other Jacksonians
that the days of the old Union or Nationalist
Democracy were over, and that the separatist
and disunion elements within the party had
obtained the upper hand. The first sign of the
new order of things was the displacement of
Blair, editor of the " Globe," the Democratic
newspaper organ. Blair was a strong Unionist,
and had been bitterly hostile to Calhoun and
the Nullifiers. He had also opposed Tyler, the
representative of those states-rights and separa-
tist Democrats, who by their hostility to Jack-
son had been temporarily driven into the Whig
camp, and who, finding themselves in very un-
congenial society, and seeing, moreover, that
their own principles were gradually coming to
the front in the old party, had begun drifting
back again into it. Polk's chances of election
were so precarious that he was most anxious to
conciliate the Separatists ; besides which he at

318 THOMAS HART BENTON.

heart S3^mpathized with their views, and had
himself been brought forward in the Demo-
cratic convention to beat the National candi-
date, Van Buren. Moreover, Tyler withdrew
from the contest in his favor; in part payment
for which help, soon after the election, Bhiir
was turned out, and Ritchie of Virginia, a man
whose views suited the new Democratic leaders,
was put in his place ; to the indignation not
only of Benton, but also of Jackson himself,
then almost on his death-bed. Of course the
break between the two wings was as yet by no
means complete. Polk needed the Union Dem-
ocrats, and the latter were still in good party
standing. Benton himself, as has been seen,
was offered the command of all the forces in
Mexico, but the governmental policy, and the
attitude of the party in Congress after 1844,
were widely different from what they had been
while Jackson's influence was supreme, or while
the power he left behind him was wielded by a
knot of Union men.

From this time the slavery question dwarfed
all others, and was the one with which Benton,
as well as other statesmen, had mainly to deal.
He had been very loath to acknowledge that it
was ever to become of such overshadowing im-
portance ; until late in his life he had not
realized that, interwoven with the disunionist

SLAVERY IN THE NEW TERRITORIES. 319

movement, it had grown so as to become in
reality the one and only question before tlie
people ; but, this once thoroughly understood, he
henceforth devoted his tremendous energies to
the struggle with it. He possessed such phe-
nomenal power of application and of study, and
his capacity for and his deliglit in work were
so extraordinary, that he was able at the same
time to grapple with many other subjects of
importance, and to present them in a way that
showed he had thoroughly mastered them both
in principle and detail, — as witness his speech
in favor of giving the control of the coast survey
to the navy ; but henceforth the importance of
his actions lay in their relation to the slavery
extension movements.

He had now entered on what may fairly be
called the heroic part of his career ; for it would
be diflScult to choose any other word to express
our admiration for the unflinching and defiant
courage with which, supported only by con-
science and by his loving loyalty to the Union,
he battled for the losing side, although by so
doing he jeopardized and eventually ruined his
political prospects, being finally, as punishment
for his boldness in opposing the dominant fac-
tion of the Missouri Democracy, turned out of
the Senate, wherein he had passed nearly half his
life. Indeed, his was one of those natures that

320 THOMAS HART BENTON.

show better in defeat than in victory. In his
career there were many actions that must com-
mand our unqualified admiration ; such were
his hostility to the Nullifiers, wherein, taking
into account his geographical location and his
refusal to compromise, he did better than any
other public man, not even excepting Jackson
and Webster ; his belief in honest money ; and
his attitude towards all questions involving the
honor or the maintenance and extension of the
Union. But in all these matters he was backed
more or less heartily by his state, and he had
served four terms in the federal Senate as the
leading champion and representative, not alone
of Missouri, but also of the entire West. When,
however, the slavery question began to enter
upon its final stage, Benton soon found himself
opposed to a large and growing faction of the
Missouri Democracy, which increased so rapidly
that it soon became dominant. But he never
for an instant yielded his convictions, even when
he saw the ground being thus cut from under
his feet, fighting for the right as sturdily as
ever, facing his fate fearlessly, and going down
without a murmur. The contrast between the
conduct towards the slavery disunionists of this
Democrat from a slave -holding state, with a
hostile majority at home against him, and the
•conduct of Webster, a Whig, enthusiastically

SLAVERY IN TEE NEW TERRITORIES. 321

backed by bis own free state, in the same issue,
is a painful one for the latter. Indeed, on any-
moral point, Benton need have no cause to fear
comparison with any of his great rivals in the
political arena. During his career, the United
States Senate was perhaps the most influential,
and certainly the ablest legislative body in the
world ; and after Jackson's presidency came to
an end the really great statesmen and political
leaders of the country were to be found in it,
and not in the executive chair. The period
during which the great Missourian was so prom-
inent a figure in our politics, and which lasted
up to the time of the Civil War, might very ap-
propriately be known in our history as the time
of the supremacy of the Senate. Such senators
as Benton, Webster, Clay, and Calhoun, and
later on Douglas, Seward, and Sumner, fairly
towered above presidents like the obscure South-^^
erners, Tyler and Polk, or the truckling, time-
serving Northern politicians. Pierce and Buch-
anan. During the long interval coming be-^
tween the two heroic ages of American history,
— the age of Washington and Franklin, and the
age of Lincoln and Grant, — it was but rarely
that the nation gave its greatest gift to its best
or its greatest son.

Benton had come into the Senate at the same
time that Missouri was admitted into the Union,
21

322 THOMAS BART BENTON:

with thanks, therefore, to the same measure, the
Missouri Compromise bill. This shut out slav-
ery from all territory north of the line of 36° 30',
and did not make it obligatory even where it was
permissible ; and the immediate cause of Ben-
ton's downfall was his courage and persistency
in defending the terms of this compromise from
the attacks of the Southern slavery extension-
ists and disunionists. The pro-slavery feeling
was running ever higher and higher through-
out the South ; and his stand on this question
aroused the most furious anger among a con-
stantly increasing number of his constituents,
and made him the target for bitter and savage
assaults on the part of his foes, the spirit of hos-
tility against him being carried to such length as
finally almost to involve him in an open brawl
on the floor of the Senate with one of his col-
leagues, Foote, who, like his fellow fire-eaters,
found that Benton was not a man who could be
bullied. Indeed, his iron will and magnificent
physique both fitted him admirably for such a
contest against odds, and he seems to have en-
tered into it with a positive zest.

The political Abolitionists having put Polk in
power, their action bore fruit after its kind, and
very soon the question had to be faced, as to
what should be done with the immense tracts of
territory conquered from Mexico. Benton op

SLAVERY IN THE NEW TERRITORIES. 323

posed, ns being needless and harmful, tlie Wil-
mot Pioviso, which forbade the introduction of
slavery into any part of the territory so acquired.
He argued, and produced in evidence the laws
and Constitution of Mexico, that the soil of Cal-
ifornia and Mexico was already free, and that as
slavery would certainly never be, and indeed
could never be, introduced into either territor}^
the agitation of the question could only result
in harm. Calhoun and the other extreme slav-
ery leaders welcomed the discussion over this
proviso, which led Benton to remark that the
Abolitionists and the Nullifiers were necessary
to each other, — the two blades of a pair of
shears, neither of which could cut until they
were joined together.

When Calhoun introduced his famous reso-
lutions declaring that Congress had no power
to interfere with slavery in the territories, and
therefore no power to prevent the admission
of new states except on the condition of their
prohibiting slavery within their limits, Benton
promptly and strongly opposed them as being
firebrands needlessly thrown to inflame the pas-
sions of the extremists, and, moreover, as being
disunionist in tendency. The following is his
own account of what then took place: "Mr.
Calhoun said he had expected the support of
Mr. Benton 'as the representative of a slave-

824 THOMAS HART BENTON.

holding state.' Mr. Benton answered that it
was impossible that he could have expected
such a thing. 'Then,' said Mr. Calhoun, 'I
shall know where to find that gentleman.' To
which Mr. Benton said : ' I shall be found in
the right place, — on the side of my country
and the Union.' This answer, given on that day
and on the spot, is one of the incidents of his life
which Mr. Benton will wish posterity to remem-
ber." We can easily pardon the vanity which
wishes and hopes that such an answer, given
under such conditions, may be remembered.
Indeed, Benton's attitude throughout all this
period should never be forgotten ; and the words
he spoke in answer to Calhoun marked him as
the leader among those Southerners who held
the nation above any section thereof, even their
own, and whose courage and self-sacrifice in the
cause of the Union entitled them to more praise
than by right belongs to any equal number of
Northerners ; those Southerners who in the civil
war furnished Farragut, Thomas, Bristow, and
countless others as loyal as they were brave.
The ejffect of Benton's teachings and the still
remaining influence of his intense personality
did more than auglit else to keep Missouri
within the Union, when her sister states went
out of it.

Benton always regarded much of the slavery

SLAVERY IN THE NEW TERRITORIES. 325

agitation in the South as being political in char-
acter, and the result of the schemes of ambitious
and unscrupulous leaders. He believed that
Calhoun had introduced a set of resolutions that
were totally uncalled for, simply for the purpose
of carrying a question to the Slave States on
which they could be formed into a unit against
the Free States ; and there is much to be said in
support of his view. Certainly the resolutions
mark the beginning of the first great slavery
agitation throughout the Southern States, which
was engineered and guided for their own ends by
politicians like Jefferson Davis. These resolu-
tions were absolutely inconsistent with many of
Calhoun's previous declarations ; and that fact
was also sharply commented on by Benton in his
speeches and writings. He also criticised with
cau^ic severity Calhoun's statements that he
wished to save the Union by forcing the North
to take a pc^sition so agreeable to the South
as to make the latter willing not to separate.
He showed that Calhoun's proposed '' constitu-
tional " and '' peaceable " methods of bringing
this about by prohibiting commercial inter-
course between the two sections would them-
selves be flagrant breaches of the Constitution
and acts of disunion, — all the more so as it was
proposed to discriminate in favor of the North-
west as against the Northeast. Calhoun wished

326 THOMAS HART BENTON.

to bring about a convention of the Southern
States, in order to secure the necessary unity of
action ; and one of the main obstacles to the
success of the plan was Missouri's refusal to take
part in it. Great efforts were made to win her
over, and to beat down Benton; the extreme
pro-slavery men honoring him with a hatred
more intense than that they harbored towards
any Northerner. Some of Calhoun's recent bi-
ographers have credited him with being really a
Union man at heart. It seems absolutely impos-
sible that this could have been the case ; and
the supposition is certainly not compatible with
the belief that he retained his right senses. Ben-
ton characterizes his system of slavery agitation,
very truthfully, as being one '' to force issues
upon the North under the pretext of self-de-
fense, and to sectionalize the South, prepara-
tory to disunion, through the instrumentality of
sectional conventions, composed wholly of dele-
gates from the slave-holding states."

When the question of the admission of Ore-
gon came up, Calhoun attempted to apply to it
a dogma wholly at variance with all his former
positions on the subject. This was the theory
of the self-extension of the slavery part of the
Constitution to the territories; that is, he held
that the exclusion of slavery from any part of
the new territory was itself a subversion of the

SLAVERY IN THE NEW TERRITORIES. 327

Constitution. Such a dogma was so monstrous
in character, so illogical, so inconsistent with all
his former theories, and so absolutely incompat-
ible with the preservation of the Union, that it
renders it impossible to believe that his assev-
erations of devotion to the latter were uttered
honestly or in good faith. Most modern readers
will agree with Benton that he deliberately
worked to bring about secession.

Meanwhile the Missourian had gained an ally
of his own stamp in the Senate. This was
Houston, from the new State of Texas, who rep-
resented in that state, like Andrew Jackson in
Tennessee, and Benton himself in Missouri, the
old Nationalist Democracy, which held the
preservation of the Union dear above all other
things. Houston was a man after Benton's
own heart, and was thoroughly Jacksonian in
type. He was rough, honest, and fearless, a
devoted friend and a vengeful enemy, and he
promised that combination of stubborn courage
and capacity of devotion to an ideal that ren-
ders a man an invaluable ally in a fight against
odds for principle.

After much discussion and amendment, the
Oregon bill, containing a radical anti-slavery
clause, passed both houses and became a law in
spite of the violent opposition of some of the
Southerners, headed by Calhoun^ who announced

328 THOMAS HART BENTON.

that the great strife between the North and the
South was ended, and that the time had come
for the South to show that, though she prized
the Union, yet there were matters which she
regarded as of greater importance than its
preservation. His ire was most fiercely excited
by the action of Benton and Houston in sup-
porting the bill, and after his return to South
Carolina he denounced them by name as traitors
to the South, — "a denunciation," says Benton,
*' which they took for a distinction ; as what he
called treason to the South they knew to be al-
legiance to the Union." When it was proposed
to extend by bill the Constitution of the United
States into the territories, with a view to car-
rying slavery into California, Utah, and New
Mexico, Benton was again opposed to Calhoun.
As a matter of course, too, he was the stoutest
opponent of the Southern convention and other
similar disunion movements that were begin-
ning to take shape throughout the South, insti-
gated by the two rank secession states of South
Carolina and Mississippi.

Most of the momentous questions springing
out of the war with Mexico were left by Polk
as legacies to his successor, when the former
went out of office, after an administration that
Benton criticised with extreme sharpness, al-
though he tried to shield the president by cast-

SLAVERY IN THE NEW TERRITORIES. 329

ing the blame for bis actions upon bis cabinet
advisers ; characterizing tbe Mexican War as
one of " speculation and intrigue," and as tbe
'' great blot " of bis four years' term of office,
and ridiculing tbe theory that we were acting
in self-defense, or that our soil bad been in-
vaded. In 1848 the Democrats nominated
Cass, a Northern pro-slavery politician of moder-
ate abilities, and the Whigs put up and elected
old Zacbary Taylor, tbe rough frontier soldier
and Louisiana slave-bolder. Tbe political Abo-
litionists again took a band in tbe contest, but
this time abandoned their abolition theories,
substituting instead thereof the prohibition of
slavery in tbe new territories. They derived
much additional importance from their alliance
witb a disappointed politician in tbe pivotal
State of New York ; and in this case, in sharp
contrast to the result in 1844, their actions
worked good, and not evil. Van Buren, cha-
grined and angered by tbe way be was treated
by tbe regular Democrats, organized a revolt
against them, and used tbe banner of tbe new
Free Soil party as one under which to rally bis
adherents. This movement was of consequence
mainly in New York, and there it soon became
little more than a mere fight between tbe two
sections of tbe Democracy. Benton himself
visited this all-important state to try to patcb

330 THOMAS HART BENTON.

up matters, but he fortunately failed. The fac-
tions proved very nearly equal in strength ; and
as a consequence the Whigs carried the state
and the election, and once more held the reins
of government.

When a Louisiana slave-holder was thus in-
stalled in the White House, the extreme South-
ern men may have thought that they were sure
of him as an ally in their fight against freedom.
But, if so, they soon found they had reckoned
without their host, for the election of Taylor
affords a curious, though not solitary, instance
in which the American people builded better
than they knew in choosing a chief executive.
Nothing whatever was known of his political
theories, and the Whigs nominated him simply
because he was a successful soldier, likely to take
the popular fancy. But once elected he turned
out to have the very qualities we then most
needed in a president, — a stout heart, shrewd
common sense, and thorough-going devotion to
the Union. Although with widely different
training from Benton, and nominally differing
from him in politics, he was yet of the same
stamp both in character and principles ; both
were Union Southerners, not in the least afraid
of openly asserting their opinions, and, if neces-
sary, of making them good by their acts. In
his first and only annual message, Taylor ex-

SLAVERY IN THE NEW TERRITORIES. 331

pressed, upon all the important questions of the
day, views that were exactly similar to those
advanced before or after by Benton himself in
the Senate ; and he used similar emphasis and
plainness of speech. He declared the Union to
be the greatest of blessings, which he would
maintain in every way against whatever dan-
gers might tlireaten it ; he advised the admis-
sion of California, which wished to come in
as a free state ; he thought that the territories
of Utah and New Mexico should be left as they
were ; and he warned the Texans, who were
blustering about certain alleged rights to New
Mexican soil, and threatening to take them by
force of arms, that this could not be permitted,
and that the matter would have to be settled
by the judicial authority of the United States.
Benton heartily indorsed the message. Natu-
rally, it was bitterly assailed by the disunionists
under Calhoun ; and even Clay, who entirely
lacked Taylor's backbone, was dissatisfied with
it as being too extreme in tone, and conflicting
with his proposed compromise measures. These
same compromise measures brought the Ken-
tucky leader into conflict with Benton also, es-
pecially on the point of their interfering with
the immediate admission of California into the
Union.

This is not the place to discuss Clay's pro-

332 THOMAS HART BENTON.

posed compromise, which was not satisfactory to
the extreme Southerners, and still less so to the
Unionists and anti-slavery men. It consisted
of five different parts, relating to the recovery
of fugitive slaves, the suppression of the slave-
trade in the District of Columbia, the admis-
sion of California as a state, and the territorial
condition of Utah and New Mexico. Benton
opposed it as mixing up incongruous measures ;
as being unjust to California, inasmuch as it
confounded the question of her admission with
the general slavery agitation in the United
States ; and above all as being a concession or
capitulation to the spirit of disunion and seces-
sion, and therefore a repetition of the error of
1833. Benton always desired to meet and check
any disunion movement at the very outset, and,
if he had had his way, would have carried mat-
ters with a high hand whenever it came to deal-
ing with threats of such a proceeding ; and
therein he was perfectly right. In regard to
the proposed compromise he believed in dealing
with each question as it arose, beginning with
the admission of California, and refusing to
have any compromise at all with those who
threatened secession.

The slavery extensionists endeavored to have
the Missouri compromise line stretched on to
the Pacific. Benton, avowing his belief that

SLAVERY IN TEE NEW TERRITORIES. 333

slavery was an evil, opposed this, and gave his
reasons why he did not wish to see the line
which had been used to divide free and slave
soil in the French or Louisiana purchase ex-
tended into the lands won from Mexico. Slav-
ery had always existed in Louisiana, while
it had been long abolished in Mexico. " The
Missouri compromise line, extending to New
Mexico and California, though astronomically
the same as that in Louisiana, would be polit-
ically directly the opposite. One went through
a territory all slave, and made one half free ;
the other would go through territory all free,
and make one half slave." In fact Benton, as
he grew older, unlike most of his compatriots,
gained a clearer insight into the effects of slav-
ery. This was shown in his comments upon
Calhoun's statement, made in the latter's last
speech, in reference to the unequal development
of the North and South ; which, Benton said,
was partly owing to the existence of " slavery
itself, which he (Calhoun) was so anxious to
extend." It was in this same speech that Cal-
houn hinted at his plan for a dual executive, —
one president from the Free and one from the
Slave States, — a childish proposition, that Ben-
ton properly treated as a simple absurdity.

In his speech against the compromise, Benton
discussed it, section by section, with great forcej

334 THOMAS HART BENTON.

and with his usual blunt truthfulness. His
main count was the injustice done to California
by delaying her admittance, and making it de-
pendent upon other issues ; but he made almost
as strong a point against the effort to settle the
claims of Texas to New Mexican territory. The
Texan threats to use force he treated with
cavalier indifference, remarking that as long as
New Mexico was a territory, and therefore be-
longed to the United States, any controversy
with her was a controversy with the federal
government, which would know how to play
her part by " defending her territory from in-
vasion, and her people from violence," — a
hint tliat had a salutary effect upon the Tex-
ans ; in fact the disunionists, generally, were
not apt to do much more than threaten while a
Whig like Taylor was backed up by a Democrat
like Benton. He also pointed out that it was
not necessary, however desirable, to make a
compact with Texas about the boundaries, as
they could always be settled, whether she
wished it or not, by a suit before the Supreme
Court ; and again intimated that a little show of
firmness would remove all danger of a collision.
" As to anything that Texas or New Mexico
may do in taking or relinquishing possession,
that is all moonshine. New Mexico is the
property of the United States, and she cannot

SLAVERY IN THE NEW TERRITORIES. 335

dispose of herself or any part of herself, nor can
Texas take her or any part of her." He showed
a thorough acquaintance with New Mexican
geography and history, and alluded to the bills
he had alread}^ brought in, in 1844 and 1850,
to establish a divisional line between the terri-
tory and Texas, on the longitude first of one
hundred and then of one hundred and two de-
grees. He recalled the fact that before the
annexation of Texas, and in a bill proposing to
settle all questions with her, he had inserted a
provision forever prohibiting slavery in all parts
of the annexed territory lying west of the hun-
dredth degree of longitude. He also took the
opportunity of formally stating his opposition
to any form of slavery extension, remarking
that it was no new idea with him, but dated
from the time when in 1804, while a law stu-
dent in Tennessee, he had studied Blackstone
as edited by the learned Virginian, Judge
Tucker, who, in an appendix, treated of, and
totally condemned, black slavery in the United
States. The very difficulty, or, as he deemed
it, the impossibility, of getting rid of the evil,
made Benton all the more determined in op-
posing its extension. "The incurability of the *
evil is the greatest objection to the extension
of slavery. If it is wrong for the legislator to
inflict an evil which can be cured, how much

336 THOMAS HART BENTON.

more to inflict one that is incurable, and against
the will of the people who are to endure it for-
ever ! I quarrel with no one for deeming slavery
a blessing ; I deem it an evil, and would neither
adopt it nor impose it on others." The solution
of the problem of disposing of existent slavery,
he confessed, seemed beyond human wisdom;
but " there is a wisdom above human, and to
that we must look. In the mean time, do not
extend the evil." In justification of his position
he quoted previous actions of Congress, done
under the lead of Southern men, in refusing
again and again, down to 1807, to allow slavery
to be introduced into Indiana, when that com-
munity petitioned for it. He also repudiated
strongly the whole spirit in which Clay had
gotten up his compromise bill, stating that he
did not believe in geographical parties ; that he
knew no North and no South, and utterly re-
jected any slavery compromises except those
to be found in the Constitution. Altogether
it was a great speech, and his opposition was
one of the main causes of the defeat of Clay's
measure.

Benton's position on the Wilmot Proviso is
worth giving in his own words : " That meas-
ure was rejected again as heretofore, and by
the votes of those who were opposed to extend-
ing slavery into the territories, because it was

SLAVERY JN THE NEW TERRITORIES. 337

unnecessary and inoperative, — irritating to the
Slave States, without benefit to the Free States,
a mere work of supererogation, of which the
fruit was discontent. It was rejected, not on
the principle of non-intervention ; not on the
principle of leaving to the territories to do as
they pleased on the question, but because there
had been intervention ; because Mexican law
and constitution had intervened, had abolished
slavery by law in those dominions ; which law
would remain in force until repealed, by Con-
gress. All that the opponents to the exten-
sion of slavery had to do, then, was to do noth-
ing. And they did nothing."

Before California was admitted into the
Union old Zachary Taylor had died, leaving
behind him a name that will always be re-
membered among our people. He was neither
a great statesman nor yet a great commander ;
but he was an able and gallant soldier, a loyal
and upright public servant, and a most kindly,
honest, and truthful man. His death was a
greater loss to the country than perhaps the
people ever knew.

The bill for the admission of California as
a free state, heartily sustained by Benton, was
made a test question by the Southern disunion-
ists ; but on this occasion they were thoroughly
beaten. The great struggle was made over a

22

338 THOMAS HART BENTON.

proposition to limit the southern boundary of
the state to the hne of 36° 30', and to extend
the Missouri line through to the Pacific, so
as to authorize the existence of slavery in all
the territory south of that latitude. This was
defeated by a vote of thirty-two to twenty-
four. Not only Benton, but also Spruance and
Wales of Delaware, and Underwood of Ken-
tucky, joined with the representatives from
the Free States in opposing it. Had it not
been for the action of these four slave-state
senators in leaving their associates, the vote
would have been a tie ; and their courage and
patriotism should be remembered. The bill
was then passed by a vote of thirty-four to
eighteen, two other Southern senators, Hous-
ton of Texas, and Bell of Tennessee, voting
for it, in addition to the four already men-
tioned. After its passage, ten of the senators
who had voted against it, including, of course,
Jefferson Davis, and also Benton's own col-
league from Missouri, Atchison, joined in a
protest against what had been done, ending
with a thinly veiled threat of disunion, — "dis-
solution of the confederacy," as they styled it.
Benton stoutly and successfully opposed allow-
ing this protest to be received or entered upon
the journal, condemning it, with a frankness
that very few of his fellow-senators would have

SLAVERY IN THE NEW TERRITORIES. 339

dared to copy, as being sectional and disunion
in form, and therefore unfit even for preserva-
tion on the records.

When the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was
passed, through the help of some Northern
votes, Benton refused to support it; and this
was the last act of importance that he performed
as United States Senator. He had risen and
grown steadily all through his long term of ser-
vice ; and during its last period he did greater
service to the nation than any of his fellow-
senators. Compare his stand against the slav-
ery extrenaists and disunionists, such as Cal-
houn, with the position of Webster at the time
of his famous seventh of March speech, or with
that of Clay when he brought in his compro-
mise bill ! In fact, as the times grew more
troublesome, he grew steadily better able to do
good work in them.

It is this fact of growth that especially marks
his career. No other American statesman, ex-
cept John Quincy Adams, — certainly neither
of his great contemporaries, Webster and Clay,
. — kept doing continually better work through-
out his term of public service, or showed him-
self able to rise to a higher level at the very
end than at the beginning. Yet such was the
case with Benton. He always rose to meet a
really great emergency ; and his services to the

340

THOMAS BART BENTON.

nation grew steadily in importance to the very
close of his life. Whereas Webster and Clay
passed their zenith and fell, he kept rising all
the timBo

CHAPTER XV.

THE LOSING FIGHT.

Benton had now finished his fifth and last
term in the United States Senate. He had
been chosen senator from Missouri before she
was admitted into the Union, and had remained
such for thirty years. During all that time the
state had been steadily Democratic, the large
Whig minority never being able to get control ;
but on the question of the extension of slavery
the dominant party itself began at this time to
break into two factions. Hitherto Benton had
been the undisputed leader of the Democracy,
but now the pro-slavery and disunionist Demo-
crats organized a very powerful opposition to
him ; while he still received the enthusiastic
support of an almost equally numerous body of
followers. Although the extension of slavery
and the preservation of the Union were the two
chief and vital points on which the factions dif-
fered, yet the names by which they designated
each other were adopted in consequence of
threir differing also on a third and only less im-

342 THOMAS HART BENTON.

portant one. Benton was such a firm believer
in hard money, and a currency of gold and
silver, as to have received the nickname of
" Old Bullion," and his followers were called
" hards ; " his opponents were soft money men,
in addition to being secessionists and pro-slav-
ery fanatics, and took the name of " softs." The
principles of the Bentonians were right, and
those of their opponents wrong ; but for all
that the latter gradually gained upon the for-
mer. Finally, in the midst of Benton's fight
against the extension of slavery into the terri-
tories, the "softs" carried the Missouri legis-
lature, and passed a series of resolutions based
upon those of Calhoun. These were most trucu-
lent and disloyal in tone, demanding that slav-
ery be permitted to exist in all the new states
to be admitted, and instructing their senators to
vote accordingly. These resolutions were pre-
sented in the senate by Benton's colleague from
Missouri, Atchison, who was rather hostile to
him and to every other friend of the Union,
and later on achieved disreputable notoriety as
a leader of the " border ruffians " in the affrays
on the soil of Kansas. Benton at once picked
up the glove that had been flung down. He
utterly refused to obey the resolutions, de-
nounced them savagely as being treasonable
and offensive in the highest degree, asserted that

THE LOSING FIGHT. 343

they did not express the true opinions of the
voters of the state, and appealed from the
Missouri legislature to the Missouri people.

The issue between the two sides was now
sharply brought out, and, as this took place
towards the end of Benton's fifth term, the
struggle to command the legislature which
should reelect him or give him a successor
was most exciting. Benton himself took an
active part in the preliminary canvass. Nei-
ther faction was able to get a majority of the
members, and the deadlock was finally broken
by the ** softs " coming to the support of the
Whigs, and helping them to elect Benton's
rival. Thus, after serving his state faithfully
and ably for thirty years, he was finally turned
out of the position which he so worthily filled,
because he had committed the crime of stand-
ing loyally by the Union.

But the stout old Nationalist was not in the
least cast down or even shaken by his defeat.
He kept up the fight as bitterly as ever, though
now an old man, and in 1852 went to Con-
gress as a representative Union Democrat.
For thirty years he had been the autocrat of
Missouri politics, and had at one time wielded
throughout his own state a power as great as
Calhoun possessed in South Carolina ; greater
than Webster held in Massachusetts, or Clay

344

THOMAS HART BENTON.

in Kentucky. But the tide which had so long
flowed in his favor now turned, and for the
few remaining years of his life set as steadily
against him; yet at no time of his long pub-
lic career did he stand forth as honorably and
prominently as during his last days, when be
was showing so stern a front to his victorious
foes. His love for work was so great that,
when out of the Senate, he did not find even
his incessant political occupations enough for
him. During Ms contest for the senatorship
his hands had been full, for he had spoken
again and again throughout the entire state,
his carefully prepared speeches showing re-
markable power, and filled with scathing de-
nunciation and invective^ and biting and caustic
sarcasm. But so soon as his defeat was assured
he turned his attention immediately to liter-
ature, setting to work on his great " Thirty
Years' View," of which the first volume was
printed during his congressional term, and was
quoted on the floor of the House, both by his
friends and foes, during the debates in which
he was taking part.

In 1852, when he was elected to Congress
as a member of the House, he had supported
Pierce for the presidency against Scott, a good
general, but otherwise a wholly absurd and
flatulent personage, who was the Whig nom-

THE LOSING FIGHT. 345

inee. But it soon became evident that Pierce
was completely under the control of the se-
cession wing of the party, and Benton there-
afterwards treated him with contemptuous hos-
tility, despising him, and seeing him exactly
as lie was, — a small politician, of low capacity
and mean surroundings, proud to act as the
servile tool of men worse than himself but
also stronger and abler. He was ever ready
to do any work the slavery leaders set him,
and to act as their attorney in arguing in its
favor, — to quote Benton's phrase, with " un-
daunted mendacity, moral callosity [and] men-
tal obliquity." His last message to Congress in
the slavery interest Benton spoke of as char-
acteristic, and exemplifying "all the modes of
conveying untruths which long ages have in-
vented,— direct assertion, fallacious inference,
equivocal phrase, and false innuendo." As he
entertained such views of the head of the Dem-
ocratic party, and as this same head was in
hearty accord with, and a good representative
of the mass of the rank and file politicians of
the organization, it is small wonder that Ben-
ton found himself, on every important ques-
tion that came up while he was in Congress,
opposed to the mass of his fellow-Democrats.
Although the great questions to which he
devoted himself, while a representative in Con-

346

THOMAS HART BENTON.

gress, were those relating to the extension of
slavery, yet he also found time to give to
certain other subjects, working as usual with
indomitable energy, and retaining his marvel-
ous memory to the last. The idea of despond-
ing or giving up, for any cause whatever, sim-
ply never entered his head. When his house,
containing all the manuscript and papers of the
nearly completed second volume of his " Thirty
Years' View," was burned up, he did not de-
lay a minute in recommencing his work, and
the very next day spoke in Congress as usual.

His speeches were showing a steady improve-
ment ; they were not masterpieces, even at the
last, but in every way, especially in style, they
were infinitely superior to those that he had made
on his first entrance into public life. Of course, a
man with his intense pride in his country, and
characterized by such a desire to see her become
greater and more united in every way, would
naturally support the proposal to build a Pacific
Railroad, and accordingly he argued for it at great
length and with force and justness, at the same
time opposing the propositions to build northern
and southern trans-continental roads as substi-
tutes for the proposed central route. He showed
the character of the land through which the
road would run, and the easiness of the passes
across the Rockies, and prophesied a rapid in-

THE LOSING FIGHT. 34T

crease of states as one of the results attendant
upon its building. At the end of his speech he
made an elaborate comparison of the courses of
trade and commerce at different periods of the
world's history, and showed that, as we had
reached the Pacific coast, we had finally taken
a position where our trade with the Oriental
kingdoms, backed up by our own enormous in-
ternal development, rendered us more than ever
independent of Europe.

In another speech he discussed very intelli-
gently, and with his usual complete command of
the facts of the case, some of the contemporary
Indian uprisings in the far West. He attacked
our whole Indian policy, showing that the cor-
ruption of the Indian agents, coupled with as-
tute aggressions, were the usual causes of our
wars. Further, he criticised our regular troops
as being unfit to cope with the savages, and ad-
vocated the formation of companies of frontier
rangers, who should also be settlers, and should
receive from the government a bounty in land
as part reward for their service. Many of his
remarks on our Indian policy apply quite as
well now as they did then, and our regular sol-
diers are certainly not the proper opponents for
the Indians ; but Benton's military views were,
as a rule, the reverse of sensible, and we cannot
accept his denunciations of the army, and espe-

348

THOMAS HART BENTON.

cially of West Point, as being worth serious con-
sideration. His belief in the marvelous efficacy
of a raw militia, especially as regards war with
European powers, was childish, and much of his
feeling against the regular army officer was dic-
tated by jealousy. He was, by all the peculiar-
ities of his habits and education, utterly unfitted
for military command ; and it would have been
an evil day for his good fame if Polk had suc-
ceeded in having him made lieutenant-general of
our forces in Mexico.

His remarks upon our Indian policy were not
the only ones he made that would bear study
even yet. Certain of his speeches upon the dif-
ferent land-bounty and pension bills, passed
nominally in the interests of veterans, but really
through demagogy and the machination of spec-
ulators, could be read with profit by not a few
Congressmen at the present time. One of his
utterances was : " I am a friend to old soldiers
. . . but not to old speculators ; " and while fa-
voring proper pension bills he showed the fool-
ishness and criminality of certain others very
clearly, together with the fact that, when passed
long after the services have been rendered, they
always fail to relieve the real sufferers, and
work in the interests of unworthy outsiders.

But his great speech, and one of the best and
greatest that he ever raade, was the one in

THE LOSING FIGHT. 349

opposition to the Kansas-Nebniska bill, which
was being pushed through Congress by the fire-
eaters and their Northern pro-slavery followers.
His own position upon the measure was best
expressed by the words he used in commenting
on the remarks of a Georgian member: ''He
votes as a Southern man, and votes sectionally ;
I also am a Southern man, but vote nationally
on national questions."

The Missouri Compromise of 1820 had ex-
pressly abolished slavery in the territory out of
which Kansas and Nebraska were carved. By
the proposed bill this compromise was to be
repealed, and the famous doctrine of non-inter*
vention, or " squatter sovereignty," was to take
its place, the people of each territory being
allowed to choose for themselves whether they
did or did not wish slavery. Benton attacked
the proposal with all the strength of his frank,
open nature as " a bungling attempt to smug-
gle slavery into the territory, and throughout
all the country, up to the Canada line and out
to the Rocky Mountains." He showed exhaust-
ively the real nature of the original Missouri
Compromise, which, as he said, was forced by
the South upon the North, and which the South
now proposed to repeal, that it might humiliate
the North still further. The compromise of
1820 was, he justly contended, right ; it was

850 THOMAS BART BENTON.

like the original compromises of the Constitu-
tion, by which the Slave States were admitted
to the formation of the Union ; no greater con-
cession of principle was involved in the one case
than in the other ; and, had either compromise
failed, the Union would not now be in existence.
But the day when compromises had been neces-
sary, or even harmless, had passed. The time
had come when the extension of slavery was to
be opposed in every constitutional way ; and it
was an outrage to propose to extend its domain
by repealing all that part of a compromise
measure which worked against it, when the
South had already long taken advantage of such
parts of the law as worked in its favor. Said
Benton : " The South divided and took half,
and now it will not do to claim the other half."
Exactly as a proposition to destroy the slavery
compromises of the Constitution would be an
open attempt to destroy the Union, so, he said,
the attempt to abrogate the compromise of 1820
would be a preparation for the same ending.
" I have stood upon the Missouri Compromise
for about thirty years, and mean to stand upon
it to the end of my life. ... [it is] a binding
covenant upon both parties, and the more so
upon the South, as she imposed it."

The squatter sovereignty theories of Douglas
he treated with deserved ridicule, laughing at

THE LOSING FIGHT. 351

tlie idea that the territories were not the actual
property of the nation, to be treated as the lat-
ter wished, and having none of the rights of
sovereign states ; and he condemned even more
severely the theory advanced to the effect that
Congress had no power to legislate on slavery
in the territories. Thus, he pointed out that
to admit any such theories was directly to re-
verse the principles upon which we had actfed
for seventy years in regard to the various terri-
tories that from time to time grew to such size
as entitled them to come into the Union as
states. After showing that there was no excuse
for bringing in the bill on the plea of settHng
the slavery question, since there was not a foot
of territory in the United States where the sub-
ject of slavery was not already settled by law,
he closed with an earnest appeal against such an
attempt to break up the Union and outrage the
North by forcing slavery into a land where its
existence was already forbidden by law. His
speech exceeded the hour allotted to it, and
he was allowed to go on only by the courtesy
of a member from Illinois, who, when some of
the Southerners protested against his being
heard farther, gave up part of his own time to
the grand old Missourian, and asked the House
to hear him, if only " as the oldest living man
in Congress, the only man in Congress who was

352 THOMAS HART BENTON.

present at the passage of the Missouri Compro-
mise bill." Many a man at the North, ashamed
and indignant at seeing the politicians of his
own section cower at the crack of the Southern
whip, felt a glow of sincere gratitude and ad-
miration for the rugged Westerner, who so
boldly bade defiance to the ruling slave party
that held the reins not only in his own section,
but also in his own state, and to oppose which
was almost certain political death.

The Gadsden treaty was also strongly opposed
and condemned by Benton, who considered it to
be part of a great scheme or movement in the
interests of tlie slavery disunionists, of which
he also believed the Kansas-Nebraska bill to be
the first development, — the " thin end of the
wedge." He opposed the acquirement even of
the small piece of territory we were actually
able to purchase from Mexico ; and showed good
grounds for his belief that the administration,
acting as usual only in the interest of the seces-
sionists, had tried to get enough North-Mexican
territory to form several new states, and had
also attempted to purchase Cuba, both efforts
being for the purpose of enabling the South
either to become again dominant in the Union
or else to set up a separate confederacy of her
own. For it must be kept in mind that Benton
always believed that the Southern disunion

THE LOSING FIGHT. 353

movements were largely due to conspiracies
among ambitious politicians, who used tlie slav-
ery question as a handle by which to influence
the mass of the people. This view has certainly
more truth in it than it is now the fashion to
admit. His objection to the actual treaty was
mainly based on its having been done by the
executive without the consent of the legislature,
and he also criticised it for the secrecy with
which it had been put through. In bringing
forward the first objection, however, he was
confronted with Jefferson's conduct in acquiring
Louisiana, which he endeavored, not very suc-
cessfully, to show had nothing in common with
the actions of Pierce, who, he said, simply de-
manded a check from the House with which to
complete a purchase undertaken on his own re-
sponsibility.

Throughout his congressional term of service,
Benton acted so as to deserve well of the Union
as a whole, and most well of Missouri in partic-
ular. But he could not stem the tide of folly
and madness in this state, and was defeated
when he was a candidate for reelection. The
Whigs had now disappeared from the political
arena, and the Know-nothings were running
through their short and crooked lease of life -
they foolishly nominated a third candidate in

Benton's district, who drew off enough votes
23

354 THOMAS HART BENTON.

from him to enable his pro-slavery Democratic
competitor to win.

No sooner had he lost his seat in Congress
than Benton, indefatigable as ever, set to work
to finish his " Thirty Years' View," and pro-
duced the second volume in 1856, the year when
he made his last attempt to regain his hold in
politics, and to win Missouri back to the old
Union standard. Although his own son-in-law,
Fremont, the daring western explorer, was run-
ning as the first presidential candidate ever
nominated by the Republicans, the old partisan
voted for the Democrat, Buchanan. He did
not like Buchanan, considering him weak and
unsuitable, but the Republican party he be-
lieved to be entirely too sectional in character
for him to give it his support. For governor
there was a triangular fight, the Know-noth-
ings having nominated one candidate, the seces-
sionist Democrats a second, while Benton him-
self ran as the choice of the Union Democracy.
He was now seventy - four years old, but his
mind was as vigorous as ever, and his iron will
kept up a frame that had hardly even yet be-
gun to give way. During the course of the
campaign he traveled throughout the state,
going in all twelve hundred miles, and mak-
ing forty speeches, each one of two or three
hours' length. This was a remarkable feat for

THE LOSING FIGHT. 355

SO old a man ; indeed, it lias very rarely been
paralleled, except by Gladstone's recent per-
formances. The vote was quite evenly divided
between the three candidates ; but Benton came
in third, and the extreme pro - slavery men
carried the day. After this, during the few
months of life he yet had left, he did not again
mingle in the politics of Missouri.

But in the days of his defeat at home, the
regard and respect in which he was held in the
other states, especially at the North, increased
steadily ; and in the fall of 1856 he made by
request a lecturing tour in New England, speak-
ing on the danger of the political situation and
the imperative necessity of preserving the
Union, which he now clearly saw to be gravely
threatened. He was well received, for the
North was learning to respect him, and he had
gotten over his early hostility to New England,
— a hostility originally shared by the whole
West. The New Englanders were not yet
aware, however, of the importance of the seces-
sion movements, and paid little heed to the
warnings that were to be so fully justified by
the events of the next few years. But Benton,
in spite of his great age, saw distinctly the
changes that were taking place, and the dan-
gers that were impending, — an unusual thing
for a man whose active life has already been
lived out under widely different"- conditions.

356 THOMAS HART BENTON.

He again turned liis attention to literature,
and produced another great work, the " Abridg-
ment of the Debates of Congress from 1787 to
1856," in sixteen volumes, besides writing a
valuable pamphlet on the Dred Scott decision,
which he severely criticised. The amount of
labor all this required was immense, and his
health completely gave way ; yet he continued
working to the very end, dictating the closing
portion of the " Abridgment " in a whisper as
he lay on his death-bed. When he once began
to fail his advanced years made him succumb
rapidly ; and on April 10, 1858, he died, in
the city of Washington. As soon as the news
reached Missouri, a great revulsion of feeling
took place, and all classes of the people united
to do honor to the memory of the dead states-
man, realizing that they had lost a man who
towered head and shoulders above both friends
and foes. The body was taken to St. Louis,
and after lying in state was buried in Belle-
fontaine Cemeter}^ more than forty thousand
people witnessing the funeral. All the public
buildings were draped in mourning ; all places
of business were closed, and the flags every-
where were at half-mast. Thus at the very
end the great city of the West at last again
paid fit homage to the West's mightiest son.

Benton's most important writings are those

THE LOSING FIGHT. 357

mentioned above. The "Thirty Years' View "
("a history of the working of tlie American
government for thirty years, from 1820 to
1850 ") will always be indispensable to every
student of American history. It deals with the
deeds of both houses of Congress, and of some
of the higher federal officials during his thirty
years' term of service in the Senate, and is val-
uable alike for the original data it contains, and
because it is so complete a record of our public
life at that time. The book is also remarkable
for its courteous and equable tone, even towards
bitter personal and political enemies. It shows
a vanity on the part of the author that is too
frank and free from malice to be anything but
amusing ; the style is rather ponderous, and the
English not always good, for Benton began life,
and, in fact, largely passed it, in an age of or-
nate periods, when grandiloquence was consid-
ered more essential than grammar. In much
of the Mississippi valley the people had their
own canons of literary taste ; indeed, in a re-
cent book by one of Benton's aduiirers, there is
a fond allusion to his statement, anent the ex-
punging resolution, that " solitary and alone "
he had set the ball in motion, — the pleonasm
being evidently looked upon in the light of a
rather fine oratorical outburst.

" The Abridgment of the Debates of Con-

368

THOMAS HART BENTON.

gress from 1T89 to 1856 " he was only able to
bring down to 1850. Sixteen volumes were
published. It was a compilation needing infi-
nite labor, and is invaluable to the historian.
While in the midst of the vast work he also
found time to write his "Examination of the
Dred Scott case," in so far as it decided the
Missouri Compromise law to be unconstitu-
tional, and asserted the self - extension of the
Constitution into the territories, carrying slav-
ery with it, — the decision in this case pro-
mulgated by Judge Taney, of unhappy fame,
having been the last step taken in the interests
of slavery and for the overthrow of freedom.
The pamphlet contained nearly two hundred
pages, and showed, as was invariably the case
with anything Benton did, the effects of labo-
rious research and wide historical and legal
learning. His summing up was, " that the de-
cision conflicts with the uniform action of all
the departments of the federal government from
its foundation to the present time, and cannot
be accepted as a rule to govern Congress and
the people, without severing that act and ad-
mitting the political supremacy of the court
and accepting an altered constitution from its
hands, and taking a new and portentous point
of departure in the working of the govern-
ment." He denounced the new party theories

THE LOSING FIGHT, 359

of the Democracy, which had abandoned the
old belief of the founders of the Republic, that
Congress had power to legislate upon slavery in
territories, and which had gone on " from the
abrogation of the Missouri Compromise, which
saved the Union, to squatter sovereignty, which
killed the compromise, and thence to the de-
cisions of the supreme court, which kill both."
In closing he touched briefly on the history
of the pro - slavery agitation. " Up to Mr.
Pierce's administration the plan had been de-
fensive, that is to say, to make the secession
of the South a measure of self-defense against
the abolition encroachments and crusades of
the North. In the time of Mr. Pierce the plan
became offensive, that is to say, to commence
the expansion of slavery, and the acquisition of
territor}?- to spread it over, so as to overpower
the North with new Slave States, and drive
them out of the Union. . . . The rising in
the Free States, in consequence of the abroga-
tion of the Missouri Compromise, checked these
schemes, and limited the success of the dis-
unionists to the revival of the agitation which
enables them to wield the South against the
North in all the federal elections and all fed-
eral legislation. Accidents and events have
given the party a strange preeminence, — under
Jackson's administration proclaimed for trea-

360 THOMAS HART BENTON.

son ; since at the head of the government and
of the Democratic party. The death of Harri-
son, and the accession of Tyler, was their first
great lift ; the election of Mr. Pierce was their
culminating point." This was the last protest
of the last of the old Jacksonian leaders against
that new generation of Democrats, whose de-
light it had become to bow down to strange
gods.

In his private life Benton's relations were of
the pleasantest. He was a religious man, al-
though, like his great political chief, he could
on occasions swear roundly. He was rigidly
moral, and he was too fond of work ever to
make social life a business. But he liked small
dinners, with just a few intimate friends or
noted and brilliant public men, and always
shone at such an entertainment. Although he
had not traveled much, he gave the impression
of having done so, by reason of his wide read-
ing, and because he always made a point of
knowing all explorers, especially those who had
penetrated our great western wilds. His geo-
graphical knowledge was wonderful ; and his
good nature, as well as his delight in work
for work's sake, made him of more use than
any library of reference, if his friends needed
information upon some abstruse matter, — Web-
ster himself acknowledging his indebtedness to

THE LOSING FIGHT. 361

him on one occasion, and being the authority
for the statement that Benton knew more polit-
ical facts than any other man he had ever met,
even than John Quincy Adams, and possessed
a wonderful fund of general knowledge. Al-
though very gentle in his dealings with those
for whom he cared, Benton originally was rather
quarrelsome and revengeful in character. His
personal and political prejudices were bitter,
and he denounced his enemies freely in public
and from the stump ; yet he always declined
to take part in joint political debates, 'On ac-
count of the personal discourtesy with which
they were usually conducted. He gave his
whole time to public life, rarely or never at-
tending to his law practice after he had fairly
entered the political field.

Benton was one of those who were present
and escaped death at the time of the terri-
ble accident on board the Princeton, during
Tyler's administration, when the bursting of
her great gun killed so many prominent men.
Benton was saved owing to the fact that, char-
acteristically enough, he had stepped to one
side the better to note the marksmanship of
the gunner. Ex-Governor Gilmer, of Virginia,
who had taken his place, was instantly killed.
Tyler, who was also on board, was likewise
saved in consequence of the exhibition of a

362 THOMAS HART BENTON.

characteristic trait ; for, just as the gun was
about to be fired, something occurred in an-
other part of the ship which distracted the
attention of the fussy, fidgety president, who
accordingly ran off to see what it was, and
thus escaped the fatal explosion. The tragic
nature of the accident and his own narrow es-
cape made a deep impression upon Benton; and
it was noticed that ever afterwards he was far
more forbearing and forgiving than of old. He
became good friends with Webster and other
political opponents, with whom he had for-
merly hardly been on speaking terms. Cal-
houn alone he would never forgive. It was not
in his nature to do anything by halves ; and
accordingly, when he once forgave an oppo-
nent, he could not do enough to show him that
the forgiveness was real. A Missourian named
Wilson, who had been his bitter and malignant
political foe for years, finally becoming broken
in fortune and desirous of bettering himself by
going to California, where Benton's influence,
through his son-in-law, Fremont, was supreme,
was persuaded by Webster to throw himself
on the generosity of his old enemy. The lat-
ter not only met him half-way, but helped
him with a lavish kindness that would hardly
have been warranted by less than a life-long
friendship. Webster has left on record the

FEE LOSING FIGHT. 363

fact that, when once they had come to be on
good terms with each other, there was no man
in the whole Senate of whom he would more
freely have asked any favor that could prop-
erly be granted.

He was a most loving father. At his death
he left four surviving daughters, — Mrs. Wil-
liam Carey Jones, Mrs. Sarah Benton Jacobs,
Madame Susan Benton Boilleau, and Mrs. Jes-
sie Ann Benton Fremont, the wife of the great
explorer, whose wonderful feats and adven-
tures, ending with the conquest of California,
where he became a sort of viceroy in point of
power, made him an especial favorite with his
father-in-law, who loved daring and hardihood.
Benton took the keenest delight in Fremont's
remarkable successes, and was never tired of
talking of them, both within and without the
Senate. He records with very natural pride the
fact that it was only the courage and judgment
displayed in a trying crisis by his own gifted
daughter, Fremont's wife, which enabled the
adventurous young explorer to prosecute one
of the most important of his expeditions, when
threatened with fatal interference from jealous
governmental superiors.

He was an exceptionally devoted husband.
His wife was Miss Elizabeth McDowell, of Vir-
ginia, whom he married after he had entered

864 . THOMAS HART BENTON.

the Senate. Their life was most happy until
1844, when she was struck by paralysis. From
that time till her death in 1854, he never went
out to a public place of amusement, spending
all his time not occupied with public duties in
writing by her bedside. It is scant praise to
say that, while mere acquiescence on his part
would have enabled him to become rich through
government influence, he nevertheless died a
poor man. In public, as in private life, he was
a man of sensitive purity of character; he would
never permit any person connected with hiir
by blood or marriage to accept ofiice under the
government, nor would he ever favor any ap
pi i cant for a government contract on political
grounds.

During his last j^^ears, when his sturdy inde-
pendence and devotion to the Unicm had caused
him the loss of his political influence in his
own state and with his own party, he never-
theless stood higher with the country at largo
than ever before. He was a faithful friend
and a bitter foe ; he was vain, proud, utterly
fearless, and quite unable to comprehend such
emotions as are expressed by the terms de-
spondency and yielding. Without being a great
orator or writer, or even an original thinker, he
yet possessed marked ability ; and his abound*
ing vitality and marvelous memory, his indom-

THE LOSING FIGHT. 365

itable energy and industry, and his tenacious
persistency and personal courage, all combined
to give him a position and influence such as
few American statesmen have ever held. His
character grew steadily to the very last ; he
made better speeches and was better able to
face new problems when past three score and
ten than in his early youth or middle age. He
possessed a rich fund of political, legal, and his.
torical learning, and every subject that he ever
handled showed the traces of careful and thor-
ough study. He was very courteous, except
when provoked ; his courage was proof against
all fear, and he shrank from no contest, per-
sonal or political. He was sometimes narrow-
minded, and always wilful and passionate ; out
he was honest and truthful. At all times and
in all places he held every good gift he had
completely at the service of the American Fed-
eral Union.

INDEX.

Adams, John Quinct: in presiden-
tial election of 1824-5, 59-61 ;
makes Clay secretary of state, 61 ;
and is assailed therefor, 62 ; out-
lines Whig policy in his inaugural,
63 ; on the Panama mission, 64 ;
in election of 1828, 69 ; preserves
purity of civil service, 81 ; on rec-
ognition of Texas, 180.

*' Albany Regency," the, adopts
" spoils system," 81.

Arnold, Benedict : compared with
Burr and J. Davis, 163.

Atchison, protests against admission
of California, 338.

Benton, town of, foimded, 25.

Benton, Thomas Hart : — local char-
acter of his statesmanship, 13 ;
birth, 23 ; boyhood and education,
24 et seq. ; religious training, 26 ;
fights a duel, 27 ; affray with
Jackson, 28 ; admitted to the
bar, 29 ; in legislature of Temies-
see, 29 ; on the Hartford Conven-
tion, 31 ; a slaveholder, 31 ; fa-
vors war of 1812, 32 , in service, 32 ;
befriends Jackson, 32 ; associa-
tions in Tennessee, 33 et seq. ; some
traits of character, 34 ; settles in
Missouri, 35 ; surroundings and
influences there, 40 ; speech on
treaty with Spain concerning Flor-
ida, 41 ; first position concerning
slavery, 43 ; enters U. S. Senate,
44; honorable financial sacrifice,
45 ; position on the Oregon ques-
tion, 50-53, 65, 263-270, 273-279,
281-289; bill to establish a trading
road through Missouri, 53 ; on the
removal of the Indians, 55 ; votes
for Clay's protective tariff bill,
58 ; opposes internal improve-

ments and Cumberland Road bill,
58 ; condemns election of John Q.
Adams to Presidency, 60 ; sup-
ports Clay, then Jackson, 61 ; will
not join outcry against Adams and
Clay, 61 ; a leader of the opposi-
tion to Adams in the Senate, 63 ;
represents ultra-Southern feeling
concerning revolted Spanish col-
onies, 65 ; vote on the protective
tariff of 1828, 66, 91, 102 ; efforts
concerning disposal of public land,
68, 77, 149, 154, 217 ; hostiUty to
the Northeastern States, 76 ; in
the Webster-Hayne debate, 78 ;
opposes Jackson's " spoils sys-
tem," 79-85 ; leader of the Jack-
sonians in the Senate, 85, 86 ;
shows that protective tariff has
not helped the West, 91 ; urges
repeal of the tax on salt, 92, 227 ;
vigorously sustains Jackson in the
nullification troubles, 100 - 105 ;
sustains the Force bill, 105 ; op-
poses Clay's compromise measure,
107-109 ; remarks on his posi-
tion at this period, 112 ; campaign
against the Bank of the United
States, 114, 130, 136, 143 ; speech
on the currency, 122, 136-138, 253 ;
conflict with Clay, 129 ; on the re-
moval of the deposits, 131 ; op-
poses the resolution of censure
against Jackson, 133 ; and pushes
through his own expunging reso-
lution, 134-136, 139-142; advo-
cates establishment of mints at
the South, 144 ; opposes distribu-
tion of surplus, 145, 149 ; wishes
it used for fortifications, 146, 150-
153 ; advocates insisting on our
claims against France, 147 ; but
opposes paying claims of Ameri-

368

INDEX.

can citizens, 148 ; opposes the so-
called specie circulars, 154 ; views
concerning Southern slavery poli-
ticians, 16'2 ; opposed to the Aboli-
tionists, 165 ; criticises Calhoun,
167, 168 ; aids to defeat bill pro-
hibiting circulation of abolition
documents through U. S. mails,
169 ; carries bill extending bound-
aries of Missouri, 170 ; urges ad-
mission of Michigan, 171 ; carries
through treaty with Cherokees,
171 ; defends governmental treat-
ment of Indians, 172 ; condemns
treaty establishing Southwestern
boundary, 175 ; position concern-
ing annexation of Texas, 180-183 ;
hostility to separatist doctrines,
188 ; blames bankers and politi-
cians for financial crisis of 1837,
190, 194 ; his forebodings of this
trouble, 191-193 ; demeanor in the
crisis, 197 ; supports issue of
Treasury notes, 198 ; opposes pay-
ment of further installment of
surplus, 199 ; supports scheme for
independent Treasury, 200, 207 ;
action concerning resumption by
bonds, 203 ; a supporter of the ad-
ministration in these times, 2G3 ;
his knowledge, 204 ; hostile to
paper currency, 206 ; defends ad-
ministration in matters of Semi-
nole war, 212 ; theory for conduct-
ing this war, 215 ; advocates
homestead law, 217 ; opposes as-
sumption of State debts by na-
tional government, 220 ; explains
greater rapidity of progress at
North than at South, 222 ; on the
tariff of 1833, 224-230; defends
Jackson and Van Buren against
charges of squandering public
moneys, 230 ; in the Harrison
campaign, 233 ; holds the Demo-
crats for the Union, 234 ; feeling
concerning slavery about Van
Buren's time, 235 ; leads the Demo-
crats in struggle between Presi-
dent Tyler and Clay, 240-244 ; ex-
alts the " Democratic idea," 241 ;
comments on Tyler's first message
to Congress, 245 ; opposes sub-
Treasury bill, 246 ; also the bank,
distribution and bankruptcy bills,
246-249 ; opposes the hour limit
for speeches in the Senate, 250-
252 ; speech concerning the dis-
trict bMiks and the currency, 263 ;

opposes effort to establish a na-
tional bank during Tyler's admin-
istration, 255-268 ; opposes new
form of Treasury notes, 258 ; op-
poses subsidizing steamship lines,
258 ; also the abuse of the pen-
sion system, 258 ; always an advo-
cate of extending the national
boundaries, 263, 267 ; opposes the
Ashburton treaty, 269, 273-279;
remarks concerning the Caroline
imbroglio, 270 ; opposes making
an efficient navy, 272 ; references
to slavery in speeches on the Ash-
burton treaty, 274, 280 ; on the
Oregon question, 281-289 ; posi-
tion concerning annexation of
Texas m time of Polk, 299-317 ;
opposes the South, 301 ; opposes
Callioun's treaty, 306-310 ; hood-
winked by the annexationists, 313 ;
attacks Calhoun and opposes the
Mexican war, 315 ; offered the
conmiand of the army, 318 ;
awakes to importance of slavery
question, 318 ; his later position
concerning it, 320, 333-336 ; con-
tests with pro-slavery Senators,
322, 323 ; opposes Calhoun as to
power of Congress over slavery
m territories, 323-327 ; and as to
admission of Oregon, 328 ; criti-
cises Polk's administration, 328 ;
visits New York in presidential
campaign in 1848, 329 ; de-
fends Taylor's message, 331 ;
opposes Clay's compromise, 332,
333-336 ; more antagonism to-
wards Calhoun, 333 ; position on
the Wilmot Proviso, 336 ; advo-
cates admission of California as a
Free State, 337 ; refuses to sup-
port Fugitive Slave Act, 339 ;
nickname of " Old Bullion," 342 ;
opposition to him in Missouri,
342 ; defeated, 343 ; goes to House
of Representatives, 343 ; begins
work on the " Thirty Years'
View,'' 344; supports Pierce for
Presidency, 344 ; but later goes
into opposition, 345 ; supports
scheme for Pacific Railroad, 346 ;
discusses the Indian policy, 347 ;
speeches on land-bounty and pen-
sion bills, 348; opposes Kansas-
Nebraska bill, 349-352 ; discusses
historically the Missouri Com-
promise, 349 ; ridicules squatter
sovereignty, 350; opposes the

INDEX.

869

Gladstone treaty, 352 ; view of
Southern disunion scli^^ne, 352 ;
again defeated in Missouri elec-
tions, 353 ; returns to labor on
" Thirty Years' View," 3i">4 ; votes
for Buchanan, 354 ; candidate for
governorship, 354 ; stumps the
State, 354 ; respected at the Nortli,
355 ; prepares his " Abridgment
of the Debates of Congress," 35() ;
death, 350 ; value of his works 357 ;
criticism of the Dred Scott case,
358 ; and of the new Democratic
theories, 358 ; domestic relations,
360 ; extensive knowledge, 3G0 ;
on board the Princeton at time of
explosion of great gun, 361 ; gen-
erous temper, 362.

Biddle, Nicholas : president of Bank
of United States, 110: his er-
rors, 124 ; his bank goes to pieces,
208.

Birney, James G. : abolitionist can-
didate for Presidency, 291, 292 ;
folly of nominating him, 293, 294,
310.

Blair, Francis C, displaced, 317.

Buchanan, James : on annexation of
Texas, 310 ; Benton votes for him,
354.

Burr, Aaron : introduces " spoils
system " in New York, 81 ; com-
pared with Benedict Arnold,
163.

Calhoun, John C. : rupture with
Jackson, resignation from Vice-
Presidency, 86; position concern-
ing tariff in 1816, 89 ; position as
a nullifier, 90 ; introduces nullifi-
cation resolutions, 103 ; threat-
ened with hanging, 104 ; arranges
compromise with Clay, 106 ; sub-
sequent quarrel with Clay con-
cerning this, 110 ; his purposes at
this time, 111 ; assails Jackson,
132 ; opposes Webster's bill for
rechartering bank, 133 ; on the
expunging resolution, 141 ; pro-
poses constitutional amendment
for distribution of Treasury sur-
plus, 144 ; opposes appropriating
Treasury surplus for fortifications,
146 ; attack on President Pierce,
166 ; his honesty, 168 ; on ad-
mission of Texas 180 ; in connec-
tion with trouble with Mexico,
260 ; on the Oregon question,
285 ; instrumental in election of

24

Polk, 292; letter to Lord Aher-
deen, 300 ; assaileil by Biuiton as
to annexation of Texas, 307, 309 ;
action as to legislation al)i>ut
Texas, 313 ; relations as to Mex-
ican war, 314 ; and tlie Wilmot
Proviso, 323 ; resolution as to
power of Congress over slavery
in the territories, 323-326 ; not
a " Union man," 326 ; on the ad-
mission of Oregon, 326, 327, 328 ;
dislikes Taylor's message to Con-
gress, 331.

California, admission of, 337.

Caroline, affair of the, 270.

Cartwright, Peter, 33.

Cass, Lewis : nominated for Presi-
dency, 329.

Cherokees, treaty for their removal,
171.

Clay, Henry : introduces his first
tariff bill, 58 ; secretary of state
under Adams, 61 ; assailed there-
for, and fights Randolph, 02; de-
vises the Panama mission, 03 ;
leader of National Republican
or Whig party, 86 ; defies " the
South, the President, and the
devil," 90 ; erroneous statement
as to effect of tariff in the West,
91 ; angers the nuUifiers, 99 ; de-
feated in presidential election in
1832, 100 ; alarmed at position of
Calhoim, 106 ; and prepares com-
promise, 106 ; afterward quarrels
about it with Calhoun, 110 ; be-
friends Bank of the United States,
124, 127, 129; effect on his po-
litical fortunes, 125 ; introduces
resolution for return of depos-
its, 131 ; also for censuring Pres-
ident Jackson, 132 ; opposes Web-
ster's bill for rechartering Bank,
136 ; on the expunging resolution,
141 ; opposes establishment of
mints at the South, 144 ; also ap-
propriating surplus for fortifica-
tions, 146 ; in financial crisis of
1837, 200; on the sub-Treasury
bill, 201, 205 ; on resumption,
202, 203 ; opposes payment of
state debts by national govern-
ment, 221 ; prepares financial
measures upon Tyler's accession,
240, 244 ; construction of a presi-
dential election, 241 ; programme
for legislation under Tyler, 245 ,•
attempts to introduce hour -lim-
its for speeches in Senate, 250*

370

INDEX.

252 ; lectures Tyler in the Bank
debate, 256 ; defeated by Polk,
290 ; causes thereof, 310 ; attacks
Taylor's message to Congress,
331 ; proposes compromise of sla-
very controversy, 331 ; defeated
by Benton, 336 ; compared with
Benton, 339.

Crawford, William H. : adopts the
" spoils system," 80.

Crockett, David, 27, 33 ; berates
Jackson, 113.

Cumberland Road, Benton votes
against bill for, 58.

Davis, Jefferson : compared with
Benedict Arnold, 163 ; a repudia-
tor, 220 ; and Calhoun's resolution
as to slavery, in the territories,
325 ; protests against admission of
California, 338.

Drayton, family, loyalty of the fam-
ily in South Carolina, 96.

Florida, the treaty securing it to the
United States, 41.

Foote, Senator from Mississippi, op-
position to his public land scheme
by Benton and Webster, 77.

Fremont, John C. : explores Rocky
Mountains, 283 ; Benton will not
vote for, 3.54 ; Benton's interest in
his explorations, 363.

Giddings, Joshua R., sound policy
of, 294.

Harrison, Wm. Henry : election not
affected by slavery question, 235 ;
death and character, 237.

Hartford Convention, criticised by
Benton, 31, 78 ; causes of, 49.

Houston, Samuel, 34 : wins victory
of San Jacinto, 180 ; hates Van
Buren, 188 ; description of, 327 ;
votes to admit California, 338.

Indian tribes, Benton on the re-
moval of, .55 ; criticism on treat-
ment of, 57, 172, 347 ; removal of
Cherokees in 1836, 171.

Jackson, Andrew : affray with Ben-
ton, 28 ; befriended by Benton at
Washington, 32 ; in presidential
election of 1824, 29, 60 ; incensed
against Adams and Clay, 61 ; suc-
cess in election of 1828, 59 ; char-
acter of his following, 71, 74, 75;

his opponents, 72 ; his victory
compared with Jefferson's, 73 ;
compared with Wellington, 73 ;
foster-father of the " spoils sys-
tem,"' 79, 82 ; inferior character
of his cabinet, 86 ; relations of
his followers with those of Clay
and Calhoun, 86 ; struggles with
the Bank and the nullifiers, 88 ;
expected to support nullification,
96 ; but does not, 97 ; repudiates
Calhoun and adopts Van Buren,
97 ; at the Jefferson birthday ban-
quet, 98 ; again defines his posi-
tion, 99 ; signs new tariff bill, 99 ;
reelected in 1832, 100 ; issues
proclamation against nullification,

101 ; special message on nulli-
fication, 102 ; opinion on tariff,

102 ; threatens to hang Calhoun,
104 ; signs " force bill," also
Clay's compromise bill, 108 ; be-
haves badly in case of Georgia,
112; attack on U. S. Bank, 114
ei seq. ; reasons of his political
success, 116 ; opposes re-charter
of Bank in message of 1829, 117 ;
vetoes bill for re-charter, 127 ; re-
elected, 130 ; removes tlie de-
posits, 130 ; protests against Clay's
resolution of censure, 133 ; con-
tinued assaults on the Bank, 139 ;
gives a dinner to the expungers,
141 ; signs bill for distributing
Treasury surplus, 153 ; issues
Treasury order concerning pay-
ments for public lands, 155 ;
Kitchen Cabinet and " machine
politics," 184, 185; liking for Van
Buren, 186 ; his nationalism, 234 ;
praised by Benton for hanging
Arbuthnot and Ambrister, 272 ;
favors annexation of Texas, 298 ;
and Van Buren, 299.

Jefferson, Thomas : character of his
following, 70, 71 ; his victory com-
pared with Jackson's, 73 ; his
pseudo-classicism, 92 ; quoted as
authority for nullification, 95 ;
celebration of birthday of, 97.

Lee, Robert E. : military standing
of, 38.

Lincoln, Abraham : services in anti-
slavery cause, 159.

Livingston, Edward : aids in prepar-
ing proclamation against nullifi-
cation, 101.

Lucas, Benton's duel with, 28.

INDEX.

371

Madison, James, quoted, 1G3.

Marcy, Wm. L., adopts "spoils sys-
tem," 81 ; criuges to the South,
108.

McDuffle, passage at arms witli Ben-
ton, 304, 305 ; deceives Benton as
to taxes, 313.

MoLeod, Alexander, case of, 271.

Missouri, character of its popula-
tion, 39 ; admission to the Union,
43, 47 ; land titles in, 45.

Missouri Compromise bill, 43 ; not
the beginning of the slavery and
anti-slavery divisions in the Union,
48 ; Benton concerning repeal of,
349.

Monroe, James, remarks, 47, 58, 59 ;
signs bill for trading road, 53.

New Orleans, Benton's astonishing
description of, 93.

Oregon, dispvited between Great
Britain and the United States,
50 ; Benton's remarks concerning,
51 ; comes into notice again in
J. Q. Adams's term, 65; final set-
tlement of the matter, 260-273 ;
neglected in Ashburton treaty,
278, and by Calhoun, 278, and
others, 279 ; Benton's feeling
about, 281, 284; bill for settle-
ment of, 284 ; Calhoun on the ad-
mission of, 326-328.

Panama mission, disputes concern-
ing, 63-65.

Phillips, Wendell, estimate of, 160.

Pierce, Franklin, assailed by Cal-
houn, 166 ; relations with Ben-
ton, 344, 345 ; a valuation of,
345 ; Benton upon pro-slavery
tendencies of, 359.

Polk, James K., character of his
following, 234 ; and the South-
western boundary, 287 ; elected
President, 290, 310 ; estimate of,
292 ; deceives Benton as to Texas,
313 ; displaces Blair, 317 ; rela^
tions with various portions of
Democratic party, 317, 318.

Randolph, John : duel with Clay, 62.
Rynders, Isaiah, a type, 291, 292.

Seminoles, war with, 209-216.

Taney, Roger B., removes the de-
posits, 12K) ; afterward made chief

justice, 131 ; criticised T)y Benton
for his opinion in Dred Scott case,
358.

Taylor, Zachary, elected President,
329 ; character, 330, 337 ; message
to Congress, 331 ; dies, 337.

Tyler, John, opposes " Force Bill,"
105 ; estimate of, on his acces-
sion, 237 ; his political affiliations,
238-240 ; first message to Con-
gress, 246 ; conduct concerning
bill for establishing a bank, 254-
257 ; his cabinet resigns, 257 ;
identifies himself with the sep-
aratist Democrats, 298 ; schemes
for annexation of Texas, 300, 306 ;
assailed by Benton, 307, 309 ; be-
havior at time of explosion of
gun on board the Princeton, 361.

Van Buren, Martin, supports Craw-
ford for Presidency in 1824,
61 ; adopts " spoils system," 81 ;
adopted by Jackson as his heir,
97 ; Vice-President, 100 ; product
of " machine politics," 184 ; be-
friended by Jackson, 186 ; sketch
of, and causes of his elevation,
186-188 ; his inaugural, 188 ; finan-
cial crisis and his doings therein,
189 et seq., 194, 196, 197 ; finan-
cial measures, 200 ; has to deal
with the Seminoles, 209 ; public
dishonesty under, 219 ; charged
with squandering the public
money, 230 ; significance of hia
defeat, 234 ; slavery question did
not arise in his administration,
235 ; champion of old-style Union
Democrats, and opposed to an-
nexation of Texas, 298 ; candidate
for Presidency, 299, 310 ; and the
Free Soil party, 329.

War of 1812, a cause of the, 7;
political influence on Benton, 30.

Warsaw, social habits of the town,
36.

Webster, Daniel, position of, con-
cerning Clay's first tariff bill,
58 ; position on the tariff ques-
tion in 1828, 67 ; in the debate
on Foote's resolution concerning
sales of public land, 77, 97 ; leader
of National Republican, or Whig,
party, 86 ; aids Jackson in nulli-
fication troubles, 103, 104 ; ad-
vocates the "force bill," 105; re*
olute in opposition to the Soutl^

B72

INDEX.

106, 107, 108; remarks as to his
services, 111 ; befriends Bank of
United States, 124, 126, 127, 129 ;
personal relations with the Jack-
sonians, 131 ; introduces bill for
re- charter of Bank, 136 ; on the
expunging resolution, 14:2 ; sup-
ports establishment of mints at
the South, 1-14; opposes appro-
priating Treasury surplus for for-
tifications, 116 ; in financial crisis
of 1837, 200; on sub-Treasury
scheme, 201, 205 ; opposes pay-
ment of state debt by national
government, 221 ; remains in Ty-
ler's cabinet, 257 ; negotiates treaty
with England, settUng bound-
aries between United States and

British possessions, 260, 262, 268 ;
criticised by Benton, 273-277, 280 ;
neglects Oregon controversy, 278 ;
compared with Benton on the
slavery question, 320, 339 ; com-
pliments Benton's knowledge, 360 ;
on friendly terms with Benton,
362.

Wellington, Duke of, compared
with Washington and Jackson,
73.

Wilmot Proviso, Benton's remarks
upon, 323, 336.

Wright, Silas, adopts " spoils sys-
tem," 81 ; expresses the " dough
face " sentiment at time of nulli-
fication troubles, 107.

4

I

I

91mencau Statesmen

Edited by John T. Morse, Jr.

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The set, 31 volumes, half levant, ^77.50.

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2 vols.
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CRITICAL NOTICES.

T7P J MTTT /"A/" ^^ ^^^ managed to condense the whole mats of
'^ "'• matter gleaned from all sources into his volume

without losing in a single sentence the freedom or lightness of his
style or giving his book in any part the crowded look of an epitome.
— 7-^1? Indepejident (New York).

^/iMrrPr ^JIAM^ Thoroughly appreciative and sympa-
^^AMUtLl. /lU/im:^. jj^gji^^ ygj £^jj. ^j^^ critical. . . . This

biography is a piece of good work — a clear and simple presentation
of a noble man and pure patriot; it is written in a spirit of candor
and humanity. — Worcester Spy.

ITF NR V I'rofessor Tyler has not only made one of the best
• and most readable of American biographies ; he may
fairly be said to have reconstructed the life of Patrick Henry, and to
have vmdicated the memory of that great man from the unapprecia-
tive and injurious estimate which has been placed upon it. — A'ew
York Evening Post.

<b

Tj/jQf/r/wr^'T'riAT Mr. Lodge has written an admirable bio-
yy^cniJiviTi ui\. graphy, and one which cannot but confirm

the American people in the prevailing estimate concerning the Fathei

of his Country. — New York Tribune.

'^HTTM A Pi A Af^ ^ good piece of literary work. ... It cov«
J-UIJIW ^u^ltio. ^j.g ^j^g ground thoroughly, and gives jusf

the sort of simple and succinct account that is wanted. — New \ ork
iLveittng Post.

TTA M TT TDJV ^'^' Lodge has done his work with conscien-
' tious care, and the biography of Hamilton is a
book which cannot have too many readers. It is more than a bio-
graphy ; it is a study in the science of government. — St. Paul Pioneer

Press.

MdP P 7^ Mr. Roosevelt has produced an animated and in-
'^ tensely interesting biographical volume. . . . Mr.

Roosevelt never loses sight of the pictuiesque background of poli-
tics, war-governments, and diplomacy. — Magazine of American His-
tory (New York).

rfA Y It is an important addition to the admirable series of
•I ' ■' American Statesmen," and elevates yet higher the charac-
ter of a man whom all American patriots most delight to honor. —
AVw York Tributie.

TLfAj? '\fJATT ^^6^^ done, with simplicity, clearness, precision,
' and judgment, and in a spirit of moderation apd
EQuity A valuable addition to the series. — New York 7'ribune.

c^TT77T777 7?<:nAT ^ Singularly just, well-proportioned, and 1t>

Jh.rr£LK<::>Ul\' teresting sketch of the personal and political

career of the author of the Declaration of Independence. — Boston
jfouniuL

.T^ri^^j^ The execution of the work deserves the highest
MA-UI^ C/iV. praise. It is very readable, in a bright and vigor-
ous style, and is marked by unity and consecutiveness of plan. — The
Nation (New York).

n A r T A TTTV ^^ ^^ °"^ °^ ^^ rao^i carefully prepared of these
(jrAL,L,Alliy. very valuable volumes, . . . abounding in infor*
mation not so readily accessible as is that pertaining to men more
often treated by the biographer. — Boston Correspondent Hartford
Coiirant.-

li/rnATT?nR President Oilman has made the most of his hero,
MUIy-KU^. ^vithout the least hero-worship, and has done full
iustice to Mr. Monroe's " relations to the public service during half a
century." . . . The appendix is peculiarly valuable for its synopsis of
Monroe's Presidential Messages, and its extensive Bibliography of
Monroe and the Monroe Doctrine. — N. Y. Christian Intelligejicer.

'rn fTKT n YTTNCV a nAM^ ^^^^ ^^^- Morse's conclusions
jOJiJy (^UnVL y AU/ilVl^. ^^n ^^ ^^e main be those of

posterity we have very little doubt, and he has set an admirable
example to his coadjutors in respect of interesting narrative, just pro-
portion, and judicial candor. — New York Evening Post.

J? A ATnn r PM ^^^ book has been to me intensely interesting.
AAlv-UUL,rTi. ^ ^ , It is rich in new facts and side lights, and
is worthy of its place in the already brilliant series of monographs
on American Statesmen. — Prof. Moses Coit Tyler.

ex ArTr^DM Professor Sumner has ... all in all, made the
-/'^^ . justest long estimate of Jackson that has had itself

put between the covers of a book. — New York Times.

VJ AT fi TTP F AT This absorbing book. . . . To give any ade-
yjiiv n UJX.IL1\. qy^te idea of the personal interest of the book,
or its intimate bearing on nearly the whole course of our political
history, would be equivalent to quoting the larger part of it. — Brook-
lyn Eagle.

^j A y- We have in this life of Henry Clay a biography of one ol
• the most distinguished of American statesmen, and a po-
litical history of the United States for the first half of the nineteenth
century. Indeed, it is not too much to say that, for the period
covered, we have no other book which equals or begins to equal this
life of Henry Clay as an introduction to the study of American poli-
tics.— Political Science Quarterly (New York).

Tj/p T> QT'p p It ^''^^ bs read by students of history; it will be

" ^/t. invaluable as a work of reference; it will be an

authority as regards matters of fact and criticism j it hits the key-

I

note of Webster;s durable and ever-growing fame-- it is adequate,
calm, impartial ; it is admirable. — /^^//a^^///J/a Fress.

CALHO UN. ^o^h^ng P" exceed the skill with which the political I
. ^ * career of the great South Carolinian is portrayed

m these pages. ... The whole discussion in relation to Calhoun's
position is eminently philosophical and just. —77^^ Dial (Chicago).

BENTON. ^\ interesting addition to our political literature,
c .X. . ' ^^°,^^^^ oe of great service if it spread an admiration

*or that austere public morality which was one of the marked charac
teristics of its chief figure.— 71^^ Epoch (New York).

CASS, f '■o^essor McLaughlin has given us one of the most satis-

factory volumes in this able and important series. .
The early life of Cass was devoted to the Northwest, and in the*
transformation which overtook it the work of Cass was the work of
a national statesman. — New York Times.

LINCOLN. ^^ . ^ ^^^^ °^ Lincoln it has no competitors ; as a
. . * political history of the Union side during the Civil

War, It IS the most comprehensive, and, in proportion to its ranee
the most compact. — Harvard Graduates' Magazine. '

SEWARD '^^ public will be grateful for his conscientious
efforts to write a popular vindication of one of the
ablest, most brilliant, fascinating, energetic, ambitious, and patriotic
men in American history. — A'ew York Evening Post.

CHASE ^-^^^ ^'^^^'^ career as anti-slavery leader. United States
" "* ^'^enator, Governor of Ohio, Secretary of the Treasury,
and Chief Justice of the United States, is described in an adequate
and effective manner by Professor Hart.

CHARLES ERANCIS ADAMS, ^'f wise statesmanship

before the Civil War,
and the masterly ability and consummate diplomatic skill displayed
by him while Minister to Great Britain, are judiciously set forth by
his eminent son.

SUMNER T^^ majestic devotion of Sumner to the highest po-
litical ideals before and during his long term of lofty
service to freedom in the United States Senate is fittingly delineated
by Mr. Storey.

STE VENS '^haddeus Stevens was unquestionably one of the
most conspicuous figures of his time. . . . The book
V'lows him the eccentric, fiery, and masterful congressional leader
tiat he was. — City and State (Philadelphia).

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